


A Tale of Horns

by George_Pushdragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-28
Updated: 2008-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:41:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24106906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon
Summary: The Inaugural 'Tongues of Fire' Wall Calendar. Harry poses. Draco poses. In a room full of choice naked flesh, something happens.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Kudos: 10





	1. A tale of horns: The inaugural "Tongues of Fire" photographic wall calendar

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to obfuscate3 and blamebrampton for the beta.

In a room this full of testosterone, Draco suspected that when he got home in the evening he would only have to wring out the hem of his robes to produce a good cupful of liquid masculinity.

A powerful stormcloud of it was centred on the second Weasley brother, the one who had gone from prize Seeker to dragon tamer, who kept a small room above an apothecary in Brasov and furnished it with the king-sized bed in which he entertained a torrent of ardent admirers.

The small proportion of Charlie Weasley that was not bulging muscle or unapologetic red hair was scar tissue. Not the sort that evoked pity, not at all. The sort that made him appear indestructible. The sort that made him ooze virility. The sort that had you picturing, about ten seconds into your first meeting and completely against your will, what his cock would be like. 

It was not a leap of imagination Draco had to make right at the moment, for two reasons, one of which was that Charlie Weasley was standing a couple of metres away from him, wearing nothing but his professional utility belt. Slung very low around his hips, its thick, battered brown leather band left him just enough privacy to make him fit for publication, but not enough that his legendary proportions were disguised in the slightest. His other tools hung around his hips: a deadly pick, a rope, a flask of potion for life-threatening burns. Draco swallowed and about ten other men and three women swallowed along with him.

"Will that do then?" Weasley asked with a knowing grin. 

Because he could, Draco folded his arms and walked a slow circle, observing Weasley from every angle: the muscular neck, the pillar thighs, the arse cheeks that looked like they could crack walnuts.

"I think we'll leave you for November," he pronounced. "Let them warm up on a few of the others before we hit them with this."

Weasley shrugged. "I'm in your hands, boss." The extreme irony of that statement in the mouth of a man who had ridden a Longhorn bareback for a dare set Draco's pulse going. "Whatever it takes to get those Galleons rolling in."

Weasley hooked one thumb into his belt and flexed the muscles across his chest, and the photographer's camera went off like a rashly mixed potion.

Draco had not required the lure of the calendar to get a good eyeful of Charlie Weasley's naked body – that one was a standard feature on the gay itinerary of Romania, as commonplace as the Black Church or Bran Castle. Neither was this project entirely altruistic. The trade was beautifully simple. Draco's next venture was going to be travelling from Inishmoor to Vladivostok by dragon, and he needed months of training. Supporting the Carpathian sanctuary got him permission to move about in its restricted territory. In return, his finances launched the calendar that would help them raise capital for their next undertaking: a research station among the Fireballs in Mongolia. 

"Mr Weasley, would you mind?" the photographer asked, drawing from his box of tricks a glass spray bottle which he applied liberally to the dragon tamer's magnificent chest until the muscles gleamed with droplets and his nipples stood erect. 

The roomful of prime flesh was a collateral benefit of the deal. Weasley, as the figurehead, had gone first but twelve months' worth of talent was to follow. Clifford from the Pride whose musculature rivalled Weasley's. Tariq, the daredevil flying carpet racer. The dark-eyed younger Lynch brother, who'd made a handful of famous Muggle films, as well as a highly collectable range of infamous ones, and could reel off a list of celebrity conquests that made Muggle connoisseurs pink with hunger. There were a few women too: Weasley's sister-in-law who'd given away her sporting career for the Unspeakables, and both of the Harpies' lithe Chasers, making up the complement among sportsmen and adventurers.

Slinging off the belt over the back of a chair, Weasley grabbed a towel from the pile of supplies in the corner and wrapped his hips in it. The audible disappointment of his audience vanished when Johnson stepped forward, her robe sliding from her shoulders. Beautiful people watching beautiful people, and all of them quietly getting off on it. This dusty old warehouse, belonging to a tea-trading enterprise acquired by one of Draco's distant forebears, could never have hoped to host such a tasty array of magical flesh, lounging on crates and timber piles in various states of undress. Even Draco's resilient ego dented very slightly in company like this; apart from the photographer and his assistants, he was the only person in the room fully clothed. 

"Tongues of Fire" was the name that Draco and Weasley had clinked glasses over, in a club in Bucharest, surrounded by a forest of bodies gyrating under the flashing lights. One of Draco's most inspired moments in a year conspicuous for its inspirations. 

Tariq went next, lying face-down on one of his carpets and smouldering back over his shoulder at the camera. Nice arse, and as Draco had discovered after Tuesday's planning meeting, those tight curves felt exactly as pert as they looked. The eager eyes of the waiting subjects suggested that at least one of them would be finding that out first-hand tonight. After him, Clifford perched spread-legged on a chair, his hands stretched out between his thighs the only thing ensuring that this publication could still be sold over the counter. 

Each famous body held a different sort of attraction, Draco noted. Stocky, slender, potent, graceful, commanding, promising. Ten subjects in, with only the Harpies girls left to go, Draco fought his first moment of regret. Though most of the participants had stayed around to watch, two or three had left as soon as their shots were done, and the end was in sight now. He could always cap the afternoon off with another round with Weasley, but a degustation of flesh as succulent as this one deserved something new. A pièce de résistance. 

"You're up, Draco."

He drew his unfocussed gaze away from Lynch's shoulder blades and turned it to Weasley.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your turn."

The unexpected command was hard enough to process without the fact that Weasley's towel had slipped so far down that only the wiry tension of his pubic hair would be holding it in place. "Nice try," Draco managed eventually. "Have they added a thirteenth month that only you know about?"

The smile Weasley gave him was the hungry one he imagined on him just before a particularly dangerous field trip. "There's only the twelve. But you still need to get your kit off."

Both of the Chasers laughed, a flirtatious musical sound that tugged at Draco's cock. They were sitting on a tall crate, stripped down to singlets and knickers, shoulders touching as they had been most of the afternoon. "We only pose together," smirked Kirchner, stretching one of her gorgeous legs so that her ankle hooked behind her team-mate's.

No-one had thought to mention that in the planning meeting. Draco seethed quietly, casting an inventive eye over the photographer's assistants, one beer-bellied and the other decidedly underage, considering whether to abandon the dragons altogether and go with his initial idea to cross from Tierra del Fuego to Tokyo on an antique Oakshaft.

He bit back a growl of interest when Weasley's hand fisted familiarly in the front of his shirt. "Get a move on. We should be in the front bar of the Leaky by seven. No time to pretend to be shy."

On the edge of the spotlight in front of the camera, he let Weasley strip the loose robes from his shoulders and pull his shirt over his head, unconsciously playing the role of servant. When it came to his trousers, Draco took control, kicking off his shoes and stepping free of the last of his clothes. This surprising turn had jerked the onlookers out of their comfortable flesh daze: the eyes sliding down his chest and along the length of his penis left a glowing feeling under the skin. Truth be told, it was arousing to stand unapologetically naked in front of strangers, in front of a greedy camera. So much so that only unwavering concentration kept his excitement from demonstrating itself.

Under Weasley's powder brush and spray bottle, he took his time planning his pose, summoning his wand from his discarded robes to transfigure the chair into a long ottoman in blood coloured velvet. In the photographer's box he found a grey silk scarf and made it white. As he sank into the welcoming plush pile, he hung the scarf from his neck and draped it down over his chest, its end trailing tactfully between his legs. A flick of his wand moved the overhead light sideways and brightened it so that its angle marked out every contour of Draco's muscle and bone in shadow as stark as ink. Then all he had to do was arch back and flex. It was the sort of pose the professional athletes couldn't pull without looking like a mountain range or a windy day in the Sahara. On Draco's leaner muscle, the effect was subtler. Understanding, the photographer dropped eagerly on one knee and started shooting.

His pleasant trance of camera flashes and hungry attention was broken by the creak of the warehouse door being thrown open. 

"Sorry I'm late, Charlie. Training session went–"

Draco jerked up to see Harry Potter standing rooted in the doorway, broom and kit bag in one hand, as he took in the half-naked bodies and his eyes were drawn unavoidably to the spotlight, to the ottoman, then to Draco. 

Draco's cock made the anticipatory leaps before his mind had roused itself: Potter was here, Potter was part of the line-up, Potter would be taking off his clothes any minute now and Draco would be here to watch. 

Potter's mouth fell open, and Draco followed his shocked gaze back to the cause: the swell of interest between Draco's legs which pulsed all the more enthusiastically under Potter's attention, poorly shielded by the thin veil of the scarf. Well, it was hardly surprising. Looking fresh from his post-training shower with his damp hair falling over his eyes, in his dark blue Puddlemere shirt over jeans, there was a wholly innocent sort of vitality to Potter. His grip on the door handle was very firm. He was, as always, completely physically present, he was undeniably fit, and Draco hadn't had him yet. Draco's dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth with desire as the first curious heads turned to look at him, pinned where he was in the middle of his spotlight. 

There were two very clear choices. He could endure the embarrassment of letting Potter and all the others imagine that he desired something well beyond his reach. Or he could show them that Draco Malfoy desired nothing except what he intended very shortly to possess.

"Fortuitous timing, Potter," Draco observed, lazy and low. "Do come in. You'll find the view's far superior from up close."

Potter's eyes snapped up to his. "Malfoy." Clearly Weasley had not been entirely forthcoming in his sales pitch to Potter. "I thought you were off in the Arctic Circle somewhere."

"Four weeks ago, I was. The Pole isn't so hard to reach as people imagine. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it sometime." That was a promising idea. He didn't need to seduce Potter. He just needed to make a convincing impression that he could. 

Tucking his towel a bit more soundly around his middle, Weasley met the newcomer at the door. "Harry's our cover shot. A good, clean picture of him will put us in every home in Europe."

Not without effort, Draco held his voice to contempt rather than outright horror. "Clean?" 

Weasley grinned that grin. "Squeaky." 

And Potter busied himself with stowing his bag and his broom and turned his back to them all.

A few minutes later, once Draco had got back into his trousers without incident, he slipped to the back of the room where the view was convenient. As the two Harpies girls lay chest-to-chest on the ottoman, Kirchner's long hair cascading downward as her head tipped back towards the camera, Potter slipped a surreptitious hand into his jeans pocket. Draco had never given much thought to desiring him, except in the idle, stranded on a desert island sort of way that probably most of the wizarding population did. But by crossing the threshold of this building, Potter had stepped out of his prim heroic persona as casually as changing shoes, and looking at him now, all that Draco could see was what was sexual about him. His jaw darkened with quick-growing bristle. The girth of his forearms. The prominence of his Adam's apple. The band of his underwear that just showed above the low-rise jeans, if you really looked hard. Wound up by the afternoon's slow cocktease, Draco found himself fixated, unable to look anywhere else. His mind swam in fantasies – simple fantasies, because with someone as straight and as unattainable as Potter, pushing him as far as a good hard grope would be enough to bring Draco off in a handful of seconds. 

As the two Chasers contorted into a new pose, Potter's attention wandered, hand still out of view. Though he mostly examined the floor and the building's beams, and the crates with "Malfoy Plantations, Ceylon" printed down the sides, Draco did not miss the way his gaze flicked to the shadowed corner where Tariq was giving Lynch the sort of massage that crept, stroke by stroke, closer to full penetrative sex. Lynch arched back, baring his throat and all of his chest; Potter's eyes widened, he sucked his lower lip into his mouth, and he watched. A few feet behind him, Draco choked on his own desire. 

"Well then," Weasley said, proceeding far more gently than he had with Draco. "I guess that just leaves you, Harry."

The hand left the pocket swiftly as the room's rapt attention turned to where Draco's had already been. 

"Yeah," Potter mumbled. "Sure."

For a man whose lot in life was being stared at, Potter appeared surprisingly reluctant to get himself undressed. Did he really have no idea how compelling he was? The direct gaze, all that professionally trained Quidditch muscle, the air of invincibility that still clung to him even six years after Voldemort's defeat. It could be false modesty, but Draco was a lot better acquainted with falsehood than he'd been in their schooldays, and he didn't think so. 

As he started with the chaste stuff, his shoes and the leather band at his wrist, the room fell into a carnivorous sort of silence that foreshadowed dire consequences should Potter decide not to disrobe voluntarily. But disrobe he did, eventually, as far his underwear, grey cotton that wrapped in a frustratingly opaque band around his hips. Draco doubted that he was the only one staring at the mouth-watering pouch that bore the weight of his cock and balls. Illogically, that last bastion of modesty highlighted his sexuality to a level that all the others' nudity had failed to achieve. Draco's palms itched, and far more than that. 

Certainly, Potter's mere presence had a heightened value given the scant publicity he consented to do for Puddlemere. But this, this was priceless. Potter stood in the vacant space where Weasley had moved the ottoman to the side, clutching his broomstick white-knuckled. "Something simple would be all right I guess."

"Nah," Weasley told him. "You won't need that. Or those."

He snatched away the broomstick and Potter's glasses. Weasley was altogether too gleeful about this pose. He took advantage of Potter's eyesight to get in a quick pinch on one arse cheek. Barely flinching, Potter shot out his hand and grabbed the front of Weasley's towel.

"That's your last chance, Charlie," he said lightly. "I can hex it off or I can tell your mother. Which would you prefer?"

Weasley sighed, watching Potter's grip delightedly. "Harry, Harry. You're breaking my heart. I keep telling you, it's just like riding a Firebolt with shoddy braking charms. You'll thank me when we're done."

Potter flashed him a smile as he let go. "You couldn't fit me in your schedule. Now how do you want me?"

Weasley warmed to his task. "Stretch up, hard, like you had the Snitch just out of reach." Potter did, and his torso pulled into gorgeous lines of muscle. When he stood on tiptoe, his thighs did the same. "Higher," Weasley told him in a slightly hoarse voice. "Let me see those abs working. Lovely. Now hold that." 

The photographer's flash went off and Draco realised with a second's delicious notice what was going to happen. With a snap of his fingers, Weasley produced a bucket of water hovering a few metres up, and tipped it. The camera went crazy as the waterfall hit Potter's chest and sprayed off the tense muscle. After a second's surprised jerk, Potter stretched up into it, a trickle of it running down his cheek and his hair dampening, black and glossy. It streamed down his torso, hugging the ridges of muscle and flooding his underpants until they slipped heavily, well below his hipbones.

Draco forced his jaw to unclench. Weasley was a dirty fucking genius. The rushing water called to mind other fluids as Potter opened his mouth and let the stream run in and out of it. The grey cotton clung like a thin skin to the swell of flesh beneath. It was as good as full frontal nudity: better, because it was Potter and because you could very nearly believe that the rampant sexuality of the picture was accidental. 

The bucket must have been self-filling, since Weasley didn't let him off for a good ten minutes or more, when the smoke from the flash turned a worrying shade of orange. Potter was drenched by then, his nipples hard as hailstones and his teeth chattering slightly. Once the water stopped and his muscles relaxed, there was a drowned kind of look to him, a little bit frail and human and if Draco hadn't already been hopelessly lost, that look would have finished him.

Nothing if not resourceful, Draco stepped forward as the others were still rearranging their incriminating lower halves, and snatched up a clean white towel.

"There's an office down the end there," he said, speaking solicitously low as he draped the towel around Potter's shoulders and fetched his glasses for him. "If you'd like some privacy while you're dressing."

As Potter tightened the towel and eased the arm of his glasses free of Draco's grip, the drowned look slipped off him and in its place was a flicker of greed, a flash of something that had got off on the covetous caress of all those eyes and, but for the necessary concessions to modesty, would have been happy to keep lapping it up all afternoon and into the evening. 

"Thanks," he said, with a knowing smirk that lasted just long enough to kindle Draco's imagination. He picked up his clothes and wandered away, seemingly oblivious to all the gazes fixed on where his pants leg had slipped up the hard curve of his right buttock, exposing muscle that clenched and relaxed with every step. 

The moment he was out of earshot, Draco rounded on the remaining audience with an air of finality. "See you at the Cauldron then. Seven. Drinks are on me."

One of the photographer's assistants started to toss small items back into the trunk while the other took down the light. 

Draco fought the edge of panic. "Leave all that here. We might need to do some reshoots after we go through the prints tomorrow morning. Come on. It's been a long day. Let's not make it longer." 

And so, with a combination of desperation and cajoling, he managed to get all of them out of the door, even Tariq and Lynch whom he located behind a stack of crates and pointed towards the nearest hotel, while Potter was still towelling himself down at the far end of the warehouse. All except Weasley, that is, who lingered. 

"I'll wait for Harry, shall I?"

"No need."

Weasley was leaning on a pile of timber, arms folded over the Horntail picture on his shirt, wedging himself in. "I'm not sure it's safe to leave him here."

"You're the only one in danger, Weasley." He let his voice get menacing. Potter was taking a good long time getting his clothes back on, but he couldn't take much longer. 

Through that dragon-taming smile, Weasley murmured, "What are you going to do to convince me to leave?"

"There's nothing I can do in the time we've got. Fuck off. Another time." 

"That's a promise, is it? Another time." Weasley's eyes were dancing and if it weren't for the once-in-a-lifetime prospect of Potter, he might have been tempted. 

"Oh come on," he crooned, resting his hands on either side of Weasley's hips. "What have I ever said no to?"

With a good hard squeeze of his arse, Weasley grinned. "Good point. You can owe me."

When Weasley opened the door, late afternoon sunlight flooded in, a little painful on the eyes. "Is he still seeing – your sister?"

Weasley's mouth curled and he pinned Draco with a long, hard look before answering. "Yes and no. Gin wants him to go back to the Aurors where there's no group showers and grabbing fans. He wants to have a go at Quodpot. Never ones for a sensible talk, my family. Instead of sorting it out, they do this." He gestured at the space where the shoot had been. "Since she got back from Tibet, I've lost track of whether they're off or on."

"Ta," Draco said as he eased the door closed – but at the last moment, Weasley's boot blocked it.

"Don't forget, Harry's a friend. If he's not in one piece when you're finished with him, you'll have to answer to me." At Draco's offended expression, Weasley's frown stretched into an open leer. "And if he is still in one piece, send him my way, will you? You know the address. Door's always open." 

Draco smirked. "Yes, Weasley. Everyone knows. And it's not just your door." 

This time, Weasley laughed as he pulled his foot back and let Draco shut him out.

A few moments later, a door at the far end of the warehouse opened and closed again. Too late to do anything much to turn the setting to his favour, he cast a couple of quick spells on the ottoman to make sure it held its transfigured shape. As Potter's bare footsteps approached, he made the best show he could of organising the bits and pieces in the trunk with his distracted hands. With his jeans back on and his shirt damp around the armpits and down the middle of his chest, Potter had that untouched sort of allure to him again, although Draco found himself wondering feverishly whether he'd bothered to get his underpants dry again or simply left them off. Following the direction of Draco's curiosity, Potter gave a snort of amusement and dropped the towel on top of all the others. 

"This is yours then, is it?"

The little warehouse looked dilapidated under his gaze. "The building? The family haven’t used it for anything for almost a hundred years. If you mean the calendar, then no. That's the product of your friend Weasley's deranged and brilliant mind."

Standing, Draco moved around to the furthest pile of crates, trying to draw Potter in the same direction to encourage him to sit on the ottoman, where there would be any number of easy strategies for getting an exploratory hand onto him. But Potter did not sit down. He stayed exactly where he was, propping his elbows back on the crate and stretching the thin shirt over his chest as if he knew the crippling effect it had on Draco's knees. 

"He said he had investors. Didn't mention any names of course. Would yours have been one of them?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

Bloody hell. If he'd known there was going to be an inquisition before Potter decided whether or not to let Draco touch him, he might have put his shirt back on. It was getting cold and, apart from the two high electric lights which luckily Lynch had known how to turn on, dark. "About a tenth of what the North Pole project cost me. Don't confuse me with a philanthropist, Potter. I've no interest in charity."

"You've got other interests I suppose."

All of them far too crude to mention to Potter at this delicate point. Instead, he flashed his most innocent smile. Potter caught it and returned it a shade darker, and Draco's stomach gave a little lurch as he found his mind drawn back to the distracting question of whether Potter was or wasn't wearing underpants.

"How do you know Charlie?"

"We have certain tastes in common," Draco smirked, wondering exactly how much of Weasley's proclivities had come to Potter's attention beyond the bare fact of his sexual preference. Potter's only reaction was to lean back a little more on his crate, making the hem of his shirt unveil a good centimetre of textured stomach and, oh heavens, that was promising. "Athletic pursuits. Horns and tails. Danger. Dragons, mostly."

"Ever ridden one?" 

Fuck it all! Potter looked like he was biting his lip regretfully on that response. Was he interested and clumsy or just playing? One way of looking at it, maybe when you were Harry Potter you didn't very often have to make the first move. In the end, though, it made no difference. It might be the accumulated lust of an afternoon of scorching hot bodies, but Draco wanted Potter fiercely, with the kind of recklessness that made him understand why past generations had committed themselves to a lifetime of marriage just for that first wild night of satisfaction. If Potter wanted to get out of here untouched, he was going to have to dodge everything Draco had to throw at him.

"Not yet," he replied, slowly approaching. "But I plan to. I'm going to ride a Longhorn to Vladivostok."

Potter lost his slouch. "Really? Sounds uncomfortable. Why would you do it?"

"You have to ask, Potter? You fly for a living. You tell me."

The room was already thick with the exquisite tension of two people together in an enclosed space where there was no longer any idle excuse for them to be. There could be no mistaking where Draco's saunter was leading him. Potter's voice dropped to a murmur.

"I guess you just like the thrill." 

Draco had a rule for straight boys. Mouth first. Hands were confronting, but when it came down to it, there were few places a bloke really didn't want to be sucked. This time, however, he had to get one thing clear.

When he spread out his hand over the base of Potter's breastbone, Potter drew a rushed breath and exhaled slowly through parted lips. Under Draco's palm the muscle clenched hard. Nice, shallow breathing, on the edge of a groan. Potter wriggled a little, unable to back away from the touch, perhaps hesitant about pressing into it. His eyes drifted towards Draco's lips and clung there as if contemplating more, but Draco didn't have the patience to wait for him to catch up. He kissed Potter, clutching at the soft swell of Potter's lower lip, probing between his lips with the lightest touch of his tongue for the short seconds it took for Potter to open his jaw and let him in. 

That was the last Draco saw of hesitation. Hardly breaking the kiss, Potter shoved him back a few steps with the force of his eagerness, gripping Draco's hip, clutching at his arse, greedy and strong, jamming their bodies together. Maybe he had done some of this before. Maybe he was just really bloody keen. Either way, Draco wanted more. He got a good grip around the back of Potter's neck and found the angle for a deeper, more demanding kiss. That's one thing girls could never hope to emulate. The ability to kiss like it was an act of penetration. If anyone had done that to Potter before, apparently they hadn't done it with half of Draco's finesse, because he stopped breathing for a good half-minute while Draco ravaged his mouth, and afterwards he kissed his way clumsily across Draco's cheek, down the side of his neck, hungry flat-tongued licks just above the curve of his collar-bone, then a growl of frustration as if he wanted a lot more than he knew how to get.

Draco tried to clutch at the threads of some strategy, but the only thing he could get a grip on was Potter's hair, damp and thick in his fingers. He turned his mouth into it to stifle the needy sounds he wanted to make as Potter mixed up his kisses with slow, hungry bites. He smelled so clean, the fresh-washed skin on his face and the wet roots of his hair and the faint powdery scent left by the towel. The only place he could really get a taste of what was uniquely _Potter_ was the inside of his mouth, and so Draco draw his mouth back up and kissed him again, sweet and deep and wondering how the hell he was ever going to make himself move on from this.

Rubbing himself shamelessly against the hard length behind Potter's denim, he knew at the first swipe of fingers beneath his waistband that he had sorely overestimated his staying power where Potter was concerned. Under the pressure of Potter's unflagging eagerness and the throb of an erection that had been threatening since his first glimpse of Weasley's uncovered arse three hours earlier, he was already on the brink of losing it. Far too late to rein in his desire. Only choice was to bring it on. 

He didn't have to push very hard before Potter got his drift and both of them were stumbling across the room, still wrapped in each other's arms, and collapsing onto the ottoman. Good spellwork: even with Potter thrashing about on top of him as he dragged his shirt off and his glasses with them and threw both onto the ground, it held its transfigured shape. He should, he knew, be thinking, anticipating where Potter's boundaries were going to be and working out how to coax him past them. But with Potter's knee wedged very firmly between his thighs, the best he could do was jerk up against it and let his hands get used to all that gorgeous muscle across Potter's chest. 

Not enough. Not nearly enough. He tore open the top button of Potter's jeans and shoved his fingers in. Oh, sweet, merciful heaven. Just as perfect as he had imagined. A complete absence of underpants. Only rough denim and a very hard, slippery cock that leapt into Draco's hand like salvation itself. Had Potter been standing there all along, swaggering against the crate and making Draco wait while his balls dragged on the denim with every movement? His fist full of cock was delicious, especially since Draco's lazy strokes made Potter so comatose with lust it reduced his kisses to a vague fluttering against Draco's mouth. 

He dragged his palm over the fluid seeping from its tip and, fingers clammy but still rough, clamped them tighter. And that was the exact moment he lost it completely because, at his first real stroke, Potter started keening in his ear. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck–"

Such a desperate sound, it didn't seem like Potter at all, except when he opened his eyes, Potter's flushed face was hovering over his, bright eyes overshadowed by deeply etched frown lines, his cloud of black hair messy and wild. When Draco went to kiss him, he turned his chin away, but the reminder of Draco's presence at the end of the hand that was bringing him off seemed to prompt him. His hand slid down Draco's stomach, searched out the line of his cock and stroked it through his trousers.

"Get it out, for fuck's sake."

"Don't stop," Potter gasped – as if any thought could be further from his mind, the way Potter was jerking and trembling on top of him, his breath a humid gust in Draco's willing ear. 

"I won't. Do it." And it was worth it all just for the helpless fumbling of Potter's normally steady hand, so overmastered with desire it took him several attempts to outsmart the simple catches on Draco's trousers. With a dry sort of murmur, he got his fist into Draco's underpants and around his ready cock and when he squeezed it, Draco screwed his eyes shut so hard he saw stars. 

"Harder." He only had to say it once. Potter's fingers tightened and pulled. _Fucking professional Quidditch grip_ was his last coherent thought before everything dissolved into a flurry of elbows and thrusting hips and the fleshy slap of two men wanking each other like their last act on earth. 

He didn't remember the moment of Potter's orgasm, only his own, the blindingly hard sort that felt like his whole body pouring itself out through his cock. He came out of the long, blissful daze to a distant awareness of the cooling slick stretching from his groin up to his navel and the quietening sound of Potter breathing, curled up at his shoulder on the ottoman. 

And in the midst of the waning euphoria he found an unexpected thread of regret. It was over. In the space of a day, Potter had gone from unattainable to been-there-done-that. Draco would move on to the next prospect, as soon as he worked out who you chose for dessert when the main course had been Harry Potter. And the next time their paths crossed, there would be no wistful frisson of possibility. There would only be the memory of a five-minute fuck that had been and gone now and, for all its fire, had been clumsy and way below his best. 

Potter sighed. "I guess I should–"

Before he could finish, Draco's arm flung itself over his chest. "You should stay right where you are for a few minutes longer. And then you'd better be ready for more."

He felt the hitch of breath under his elbow. The smile he had to turn to see. It looked a little bit dizzy. And it occurred to Draco, quite out of the blue, seeing those familiar features lying horizontal against the red velvet, all flushed and sweat-glossed and unguarded, that he really, really liked Potter's face.

"Have you done this before then?" Draco asked impulsively. At Potter's panicked expression, he amended, "The pictures. You handled it ... not badly."

Potter swept his palms over his face, pushing the tangled hair back. "A few shots for the team I guess. Nothing like–" A grunt of laughter. "This was something different."

And after that was a long silence that made Draco want to say something, anything, to distract Potter from recalling any of the perfectly good reasons for him not to be here. 

"It wasn't only tea, you know," Draco said abruptly. "In the last years of the goblin wars there was a constant supply of potions ingredients passing through here. Coming the long way, over the water, mixed up with Muggle shipments. Not many had the contacts in Asia to call in that sort of favour. Lucky thing. The war could have gone the other way."

Potter's dark lashes fluttered open. He turned. Out of nowhere, he said, "That time you raced the Hogwarts Express through the Lothian tunnel. You staged that, didn't you?"

"Don't be ridiculous." Somewhere, he had photographs of how he'd looked afterwards, the steam burns on his face and wrists, the scorched bristles on his broom. "That project cost me ten thousand Galleons. What on earth would be the point in paying all of that and not actually doing it?"

As Potter turned on his side, Draco tried unsuccessfully not to watch the slow tumble of his cock draping itself over his thigh. "Is that all you want to do? Fritter away the last of your family's money on crazy stunts?"

"Until I run out of challenges," Draco snapped back. He could feel his jaw going rigid, along with all the tendons in his face.

"Don't," Potter said and kissed him. 

This time, concentrating, Potter was good at it. Better than good. He kissed like it was an erotic act in itself, more than just an introduction to something more carnal. His tongue lingered in Draco's mouth. His body raising itself over Draco's once more was a heat source in the cooling air.

In the end it was Draco who gave in to impatience and slid his hand back into the open front of Potter's trousers. Their murmurs met in Potter's mouth when he cradled Potter's slack length and worked it towards hardness. But Draco needed more than a grope this time. Needed to see everything that Potter had, get it out in the open, claim it, suck it, rub himself into it. Potter's hand followed his shoulder as he scrambled down the ottoman and guided the tip of Potter's cock between his lips. That got him a very satisfying shudder and, with it, a realisation. Once was never going to be enough, not for any of this. He liked the way Potter moved. He liked the way Potter smelled. He liked the way Potter didn't stop being Potter when he fucked. 

Potter's muffled groan as Draco took his cock all the way to the top of his throat seemed to vibrate right down his spine and into his chest. A few more hungry strokes and he let it free, tugging Potter's jeans down, panting as he tore them over his bare feet and threw them on the floor. Looking down at Potter, utterly naked from top to toe, like every single person present today had wanted him but only Draco had got to have him, it took longer than it should have to get his own trousers off. 

He sank to his knees beside the ottoman. Potter made him feel filthy. Made him want to think of things he'd never done before and try them out to leave an indelible impression.

"This way," Draco panted out, pulling Potter towards the edge and turning him by the hip.

Oh well. He had to be clean enough after all that water, and sweet fucking Merlin, Draco wanted it. Potter swore when Draco ran the pad of his thumb from behind his balls up along his crease. There was something hopelessly tender about the way Potter bent his head down then, concealing his face with the ends of his dangling hair catching on the velvet, as if after everything he'd fought his way through, this was the one thing he didn't know if he'd be able to stand. Draco intended to make damn sure that he couldn't. He parted Potter's cheeks and swiped his tongue up between them, lazy and shallow enough that he had room to take Potter a whole lot further before he let him go. 

And, fractionally, Potter edged his knees further apart. Draco licked again, slower and dirtier, and there it was, another tiny widening. That killed the last of Draco's restraint. He drove his tongue hard against Potter's hole, felt it spasm in resistance then loosen under a gentler caress. He pressed the meaty centre of his tongue firmly up against that reluctant entrance and dragged it back and forwards, relentless texture over hyper-sensitive skin, flicks of the point of his tongue that made Potter shudder. Leaning down on his elbows now, Potter was making his whole body into one unwavering plea for more. 

And Potter, who gave pitch-side interviews in a rock-steady voice just seconds after descending from the final chase, was panting uncontrollably now, muscles trembling all the way down his back, clenching and unclenching around Draco's tongue. His skin gleamed with sweat. Draco screwed his eyes shut. Potter was too much. He unearthed reckless desires Draco hadn't felt for years, made Draco long to inflict any range of brutal and animal acts on him, just to see what he could take. Just to make certain that, afterwards, Potter went away with every sordid detail imprinted deep in his memory. Draco was beyond technique now. Out of control. Plunging in, licking and sucking, doing his best to fuck Potter to death with his tongue while Potter's panting got a pleading edge of voice on it that sent Draco's hand wandering down between his own legs to stroke his aching cock. No. Too quick. Too distracting. Damn Potter to the farthest depths of hell. Even in fucking, potentially the most gratifyingly selfish act in Draco's experience, he made you want to make it all about him. 

Draco did. Tentatively, he put one wet finger alongside his tongue and slowly worked it in. Potter breathed in sharply as his body instinctively pushed against the intrusion, but bit-by-bit he mastered his instincts and accepted it. More than accepted it. As Draco slid it in to him and out again, he clenched hard around it, swallowing a moan, and the rocking rhythm in his hips started to get so frantic Draco wondered if he'd lost track of who he was with or what he was doing. 

It was only when he felt the bite of a second finger that he came to his senses. 

"No!" A bark of a sound that seemed to carry all the pent-up shock of having let this go as far as he had. Draco left his fingers where they were and let his eyelids fall closed. His erection for the first time flagged at the dashing of hopes he hadn't consciously let himself articulate. "I would–" Potter was stuttering, "Another place, another time. Maybe." Draco withdrew his fingers and replaced them with his tongue. "Oh jesus, that's not helping. No, don't stop. Don't stop. It's only – _fuck!_ It's only, not here. Somewhere with a bed. And a bit more warning. D'you– _mmmh_."

Draco demonstrated with both hands on Potter's arse cheeks and with the hungry point of his tongue that, yes, he did understand. Or at least didn't hold any grudges. And Potter went back to making those blissful little murmurs that only presaged the howl he'd give if Draco ever got to show him what a proper fucking was like. 

He was hooked on the point of Draco's tongue now, jerking his hips in time with each swipe. Soaked in Draco's spit, his hole gave way just a little under each thrust. When Draco slid his hand around to nurse Potter's balls, clutching them firmly up against his body, Potter went wild. Tight grip on his shaft, Potter wanked himself rapidly, base of his spine still arching upwards to make the most of Draco's mouth. Since it was abundantly clear from the throb and swell in his palm that Potter wasn't going to last long this way, Draco simply clung to his handful of flesh and tortured Potter with his tongue, their fingers brushing on the downstroke as Potter hurtled and bucked and gasped his way to climax. 

No sound from Potter when he came. Just a shudder that jerked through his whole body and the extravagant spurt of his orgasm. Draco followed every tremor of it, in his palm and under his mouth. Then he eased Potter down onto the ottoman and turned him onto his back.

He looked shell-shocked. His face was dark, eyes vacant, and Draco knew with absolute certainty that, if he didn't get to fuck Harry Potter today, it was already too late for him to go away unsatisfied. He wet his finger in a dribble of come staining the velvet and traced it around Potter's nipple, teasing it into hardness. Potter threw his head back and sighed. While Draco was doing the other to match, Potter seemed to pull himself together, and the next time Draco raised his semen-slick finger, Potter seized it and put it in his mouth. His eyes stayed on Draco's as he sucked it clean, daring him to use his imagination. Not a lot of imagination was necessary. With Potter looking up at him like that, his muscular tongue thrusting into the webbing between Draco's fingers, he could feel it in his cock already. 

"More?" Potter smirked up at him, running the pad of Draco's finger back and forward over his bottom lip. Astonishing how, naked on his back and still flushed from what he'd just let Draco do to him, Potter could give the impression of being the one in control. 

"If you're up to it."

Potter laughed, a lovely flex of muscle running around his ribs. He'd probably never seen Potter completely at ease before. It was another one of those things he'd want to have more than once. 

"I might be."

He'd thought that the angle on the ottoman would make it disappointing, but Potter simply swung himself onto the ground and, kneeling between Draco's parted knees, bent over his lap. He used his hand first, a sudden brush of his thumb over Draco's swollen balls that looked like touch simply for the sake of touch, such an unapologetic act it produced an instant twitch in Draco's cock. Potter followed the movement and licked it with his flat, wet tongue. 

Lucky the velvet was transfigured because it was not going to survive the gouging of Draco's fingers. There were blow jobs, there were great blow jobs, there were unforgettable blow jobs, and then there was the singular sight of Potter licking his lips about an inch above the glossy head of his cock. Potter lowered his head slowly. If he didn't hurry the fuck up, Draco was going to lose it all over his face. That hot, shallow breath would be the end of him. Finally, his lips closed softly over the tip of it and, yes, that was the one thing that could top the day's parade of prime flesh. Harry Potter with a mouthful of Draco's cock. That stubborn, hard mouth wrapped around him, not just willing but determined, sliding halfway down his shaft and up again. 

It almost finished him off, the moment when he realised that Potter's hands were staying right where they were, one supporting him on the ottoman with the other on Draco's thigh. He was going to do this with just his mouth. He wanted to do it the long way, the hard way. Maybe he even liked it. Draco hastily revised all his assumptions about Potter's sexual preferences and let his imagination run wild with the things they might do together another time, with a little preparation. The only slender thread holding him back from orgasm was that Potter was taking it slow, stopping every few strokes to take a wet sounding breath and play the tip of his tongue all over the head. That mouth! Sweet Merlin, that mouth that sat in a calm smile on the front page of the Prophet and offered reasoned comments on whichever issue on the day demanded his view, that strong mouth was sucking him, full of the slippery taste of Draco's leaking cock. 

At the encouragement of Draco's hand snatching his hopeless snarl of hair, he picked it up, head rising and descending quickly as his hand pushed Draco's thighs a little further apart. Draco's hips took up the irresistible rhythm, buttocks and thighs clenching with each stroke as he thrust himself up into Potter's mouth. He thought about the moment of orgasm, the power of fucking Potter's mouth as it filled with his come. Potter's pace went up another notch, and then it was all over. He seemed to come forever, pulsing into the back of Potter' s mouth as the spasms shook him and tensed him up and released him again. And through it all, Potter just kept sucking, holding Draco in place. 

He wanted to say something afterwards. The sight of Potter so completely messed up demanded some sort of observation, but he didn't trust his voice. He hooked his fingers under Potter's chin and tilted his face up so he could lick at the glossy trickle at the corner of his mouth. And then they were kissing again, lush, open mouths and slow-moving tongues. He lost track of time in that kiss. He lost track of pretty much everything except the need to be joined to Potter at the mouth. 

And afterwards, since Potter appeared to be reviving, Draco laid him out on his back and let his hands and mouth wander at will. Stripped of any shred modesty now, utterly compliant, Potter arched into the tongue teasing his navel, tilted his hips up into Draco's slow and lazy grip. Draco's heart beat high and hard in his ribs as he watched Potter give himself up with a sigh to Draco's control. Unhurriedly, they brought him to one last writhing climax, and after that the contentment was so naked on his face that all Draco could do was collapse beside him and close his eyes.

A good while later, watching Potter's bare arse and back as he bent to gather his clothes, Draco found the sight too pleasing to allow any sense of regret. He watched shamelessly as Potter dressed, and didn't miss the little curve of his mouth or the vain flex of muscle when he noticed his audience. 

"I might still catch them at the Leaky," Potter said as he picked up his kit bag. "Will I see you there?"

Amazing, Draco thought distractedly, how he looked clean again, just by putting on his clothes. "What? No. I won't bother."

"No stamina," Potter grinned.

"No interest." He didn't add that even Lynch, whose scandalous and acrobatic proclivities were the stuff of legend, held fairly little appeal for him right now. "It will all be dragon talk anyway. Your friend Weasley gets a bit obsessed when he's drunk."

Potter was looking at him. He dropped his kit bag and rifled through it. 

Draco kept his expression absolutely flat as Potter approached.

"What do you think you're doing?" he snapped, although he knew very well what those plastic Muggle quills were for. Potter shook off his hand and touched the tip of the quill to Draco's chest, on the ribs under his left nipple. Its tip was cold and very faintly damp. Mesmerised and more than a little aroused, he watched Potter write, black ink sliding onto his skin, shaping an address. 

"Come and see me," Potter said. "Like I said, I'm game to go further."

He kissed Draco's nipple. Obediently, the flesh rose up. There was a naked flicker in his eye that asked for more, but Draco pretended not to see it. You couldn’t give everything up straight away. You had to withhold something to make them interested in coming back. And in any case, he was going to need some private time very soon to deal with what the prospect of Potter's offer was doing to his cock. 

"See you, Potter," he said, as low and as promising as he could make it. 

Potter left him one last smile as gathered his broom and headed out the door, looking wholesome down to the last hair on his head as he stepped into the night. 

No sooner had the door closed than, with a flick of his wrist, Draco drew the camera to him and pulled out the drawer in its base. Photographs tumbled out of it, the last ones first. No-one had ever said it to him in so many words, but he suspected that photography was one of those rare technologies invented by Muggles then later adapted to magic. In his hand, Potter threw his head back, eyes closed, lips parted, water planing over his chest. There were times, admittedly rare ones, when Draco really loved Muggles.

He sighed from deep down as his fist closed around his cock. One way of looking at it, the calendar had been a complete waste of time, because his plans had just changed and he didn't think he would be getting back to Romania to hone his dragon-riding skills for a good while now. Another way, it was the best fucking thing he'd done all year. Tongues of fire, indeed. He still had Potter's taste in his mouth. 

**


	2. Mating rituals of the winged predator: How Mr February got almost everything he wanted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goddessriss was a fantastic beta. It's a tighter story for her input.

Potter lived off Borough High Street, close enough to Toad's Eye Lane that his house probably belied its Muggle facade with a hidden doorway or a convenient underground passage giving direct access to the wizarding district. Straddling both worlds and expecting the best of both. How completely and laughably Potter. 

Draco kept close to the wall as he counted the street numbers, staying well clear of the passing motor cars which no amount of familiarity would entice him to trust. He might have travelled in them, on the continent, on a handful of occasions when he'd been drunk enough on foreign liqueurs and a potent combination of lust and machismo that the risk seemed inconsequential. But in sobriety he knew them for what they were. Killing machines placed flippantly in the hands of the young and the stupid – such homicidal negligence when wizards required rigorous training before being permitted to so much as turn a daisy into a butterfly. 

The address that he'd finally erased from his chest last night resembled all the others in the brown-brick row: two storeys with tall, rectangular windows framed in white. It was only standing on the step that its heritage was apparent: every alternate keystone in the arch over the front door bore a swirling dragon carved in Coade stone. An old wizarding house, then. When Draco touched one of the carved stones, its occupant opened a crystalline eye and stretched, giving a testing flick of its tail. Old and showy. Probably built by a Rosier or one of the other old families who'd made a point of keeping a frosty distance and the whole bulk of the river between themselves and the Ministry's growing interference. Potter did have a habit of making controversial choices – and Draco's chest warmed with memory as he continued teasing the stone dragon just to the left of the doorknocker. In a few moments he'd find out a few things. Whether Potter's eagerness for experimenting had faded in the nine days Draco had let pass to preserve the necessary impression of aloofness. Whether Potter could be as adventurous in the familiarity of his own home as he'd been in the temporary set-up of the photo shoot. Whether Potter lived alone. 

Draco knocked. A silencing charm must have muffled the sound of footsteps since the first sign of company was the door swinging open. In the midst of a general impression of scruffy, casual energy, the first thing he noticed was Potter's smile. It flashed brightly before Potter got it under control. 

"Malfoy." Barefoot in an ancient pair of jeans and a hooded shirt, he made Draco think immediately of a leisurely afternoon of drinking and talking Quidditch and anticipating the sex to come. He wondered how long it would be before he could look at Potter and think about anything that didn't end up at sex. 

Draco smirked, "I was in the neighbourhood."

"Of course you were." That brought the smile back to Potter's lips. In the silence, he kept his grip on the door latch and inspected his visitor – there was no fault to find; Draco had a working mirror and a healthy sense of pride. 

"I'm not going to bother with a pretext. Either invite me in or I'll be on my way."

Potter glanced over his shoulder, frowning. "I can't right now."

Company. Fuck. Perhaps nine days had been too long after all.

Catching his expression, Potter descended quickly onto the top step, their faces bare inches apart. "I've got friends over. That's all."

From this close, his breath had the milky smell of tea on it. Everything about him was homely and comfortable – everything except Draco's extremely vivid recollection of how he looked with his clothes stripped off and his modesty flung away. He had to have that again. He leaned in.

"Don't." A hand on his chest brought him up just short of mouthing Potter's jaw. Potter pushed him back a little, darting a furtive glance down the street. "It's never private here."

His fingers, however, were tightening in Draco's shirt, knuckles rubbing his chest underneath it. "This is bad," he said, a deep, breathy sort of tone that spoke straight to Draco's cock. As his fingers lost their grip and splayed out, Draco clenched his muscles to give him something worth feeling up. "I can't, I wish I could. I've got company. And training at one. What are you doing after? About five."

Draco considered trying to push Potter into giving him something to tide him over here and now; weighed up whether he wanted to know who Potter's guest was.

"Four?" Potter was negotiating with himself. "I can skip off early."

"Four then." Draco swallowed his further requests: wear what you're wearing now; leave the underpants off; don't shave. He took a step backwards before his anticipation could carry him away.

"Oy!" an unmistakably broad Weasley voice carried down the stairs – it could be any of them except Charlie, the sister or the puffed-up one. "Get back up here! It's your move."

Potter shrugged and retreated into the shelter of the doorway. 

"Come to my flat. On the square behind the Prophet building, first house-"

"I know where it is," Potter said. 

Draco could still feel the tingle of his gaze as he walked away, keeping his stride swift and impersonal and fighting the urge to run. 

**

He spent most of the afternoon at one of the front tables in the Cauldron and Kettle, trying to go slowly on his drinks and shooting patrons and staff alike the same cocky glare that said "I'll be fucking Harry Potter this afternoon – what will you be doing?"

After a hasty trip to a few favoured suppliers, having laid the firewhiskey bottle on the kitchen table he found himself arranging and re-arranging the table by his bed. All up, he had four varieties of lubricant, a couple of good invigorating potions (emergency use only), and a generous supply of those revolting Muggle sheaths (just in case they turned out to be non-negotiable for Potter). 

He stowed all of these out of sight, except one pot of lube which he stared at, sitting on the bed, for a good quarter of an hour, mind leaping with images of what he was about to do with it. Potter was coming here for sex. Nothing else. Hot and reckless no-strings sex – no seduction needed, no strategy. Just a whole lot of dick-stroking and naked skin and those strangled groans Potter had let out when Draco's fingers were in him. 

He knew how he wanted it to be. He wanted Potter like he'd got him by the end of that afternoon of the photo shoot – drunk on sex to the point where there was no glimmer of self-control left in him, drifting and trailing on Draco's whim. Holding nothing back. Giving himself over completely to pleasure. That's how Draco wanted him, and when he'd got him to that point, Draco was going to fuck him. And Potter would be so out of it he'd barely even remember how Draco had done it; all he'd know is that an hour later his hands were still shaking and his hips were still jerking to the rhythm of Draco's thrusts and he had never, ever felt so empty in his life as he did without the stroke of Draco's cock in him. That's how Draco wanted it. But he had to admit, there were about a hundred other ways he was prepared to accept it. 

He rubbed himself through his trousers and flirted with the idea of a quick wank to relieve the tension. But then the doorbell rang. It was just gone half past three. 

Draco gave himself one last check in the mirror. Black trousers; white shirt in old Indian muslin that looked fine enough to tear at a touch; hair as messy as a little wax could make it. It barely departed from what he'd worn at the calendar shoot. Whatever magic had worked last time, he wanted it to work again. 

**

"I got away early," Potter said, standing stiffly on his doorstep with a bottle of firewhiskey in one hand, kit bag and broom in the other. He smelled of cologne this time, not quite so fresh and innocent, but in compensation his shirt was the sort of tight black that had "date" written all over it. And he was nervous. Draco had spent enough years watching him that a more adult perspective helped him pick it up. 

"I've only just got in," Draco lied airily. "It's lucky you caught me."

"You look good."

That knocked Draco's attitude right out from under him. His hauteur faltered as he held off the rising colour in his neck. It was – well, he didn't care to sift through the entire contents of their history, but it was probably the first compliment he'd ever received from Potter. He managed an equivocal grunt as he opened the door and turned back down the hallway.

"Malfoy." Potter's voice had a dark intent to it that crept like fingers up Draco's spine. He turned back to find Potter standing very close, the door shut behind him. "If I've got it all wrong, tell me. I hope I haven't got the wrong idea about what I'm here for."

The impatience was good: Draco wanted the stakes to be high for Potter. "I hope so too," he said, sucking his lower lip into his mouth and letting it slide free. Potter's eyes clung to the motion. Then he dropped his kit bag and broom, grabbed Draco's waist with his free hand and kissed him. Before he could think, Draco had already tilted his head and opened his mouth and let him. Potter had shaved this time, losing the rough bristle that had rubbed Draco's skin deliciously ragged before, but there was no less urgency in the way he kissed. Potter manoeuvred them both a few steps back and set down the firewhiskey bottle on the hall table and, with both hands free, he lost some more caution. He seemed to like the texture of Draco's shirt, rubbing over the back of his shoulder-blades, other hand groping the front of Draco's ribs. If he liked it half as much as Draco liked the unashamed roam of Potter's hands on his body, it would be driving him crazy. 

Potter shoved him harder into the table, keeping up the open-mouthed kiss. This was a hair's breadth off perfection. He'd had one or two men with a roughness to match Potter's, though never with the same sense of need. Weasley, for instance, used every tasty muscle on his torso to full effect, but sex was always a joke with him – he laughed and talked while Potter was all serious, painful desire. Draco let him grind their hips together until his long-threatening erection jabbed hard and demanding into Potter's hip.

"I want that," Potter said hoarsely, dipping down to bite Draco's throat – and where the hell were all of Draco's intricate plans for taking it slow? Where was the control he'd planned to wield? He didn't want it to pass in a glorious carnal blur like last time. He wanted those lulls where sheer lust no longer addled the senses. He wanted to make damn sure that Potter knew exactly who he was with and what was being done to him. But at this rate, he was a few good, dirty strokes away from coming in his pants and Potter was-

Potter was on his knees. Draco actually groaned as he planted his hands wide apart on the table behind him. He couldn't help it. Three minutes inside the door and the first thing Potter wanted to do was suck him off. If Potter had any plan, he'd obviously chucked it on the floor with his gear. But then Draco's sense of strategy was no better at the moment. He'd forgotten how wild it felt to be with Potter, all your usual technique shot as you went with him, launching from one reckless desire to the next. None of the rules ever applied to Potter. He did his own thing, and right now his thing was getting Draco's trousers down.

As Potter wrenched his belt open, Draco's cock gave a very interested throb and Potter pressed his mouth into it through his trousers. He opened his jaw and bit it gently, and again, until Draco ground out- "Stop!"

The hallway echoed with his panting. Potter reluctantly raised his attention from Draco's groin to his face, wary.

"For fuck's sake, do you have to have every single fucking thing all at once? I mean – this doesn't have to be like two schoolboys frotting behind the broomsheds. You can have a little fucking-" He had to swallow hard, his mouth was bone dry, and clenched his hands tight on the table's edge to keep them still. "-finesse." 

Potter just ran his thumb up the line of Draco's erection, finally taking his glasses off and tossing them onto the table. "Do you want me to do this or not? If you do, it'll be my way."

Draco looked hastily away. Down the hall, where he was hit with the image of himself walking back to the kitchen with the second bottle of firewhiskey, then the bedroom with the carefully selected array of lubricants, while Potter walked the other way, out onto the street, for good. He could feel his knuckles straining. He didn't say anything when Potter's hands settled back on his waistband but he let out a wistful little breath. 

When Potter had got his trousers open and his pants loose, he shoved both greedy hands into them, one cupping Draco's balls while the other gripped his shaft. Draco's hips bucked out of control. He hadn't counted on the fact that Potter's newness to all of this would infect him too, make him feel like a novice with a man's hands on him for the first time. Potter's hands. Potter's beautiful, broad, broom-callused, snitch-catching, Dark-Lord-slaying hands. 

Potter angled his cock outwards and licked across the top of it. He waited until Draco had prised his eyes open again and looked down, a little hazily, and then he did it again, slow and deliberate, with his gaze locked on Draco's. And there was that feeling again, like he'd never had a real blow job, not until now. Jaw slackening, Potter slid his lips around the head, leisurely sucks hot with the swipe of his tongue, and released it again shiny and straining and leaking. When he kissed the swollen flesh around the slit, Draco's back gave an involuntary arch. Potter was _dirty,_ deep, deep down where his adoring friends would never have thought to suspect it. For the first time he felt the faintest tremor of doubt. Might Potter have curiosities that went beyond what Draco was prepared to do?

Now Potter was making free with his tongue, licking Draco's cock like it was a delicacy he'd waited too long to taste. And Draco guessed that Potter must have practised this bit. Or at least imagined it in vivid detail. As Potter rubbed Draco's cock over his tongue, the unforgettable image came to him of Potter at home at night alone these last two weeks, reliving the details of their encounter, peering down all the paths they might have taken, picturing all the other things they might have done together, coming repeatedly in his own bed with Draco's name on his lips.

Draco threw his head back as the first pulse of orgasm ripped through him. And then Potter's mouth was enveloping him, wet and hot, sucking the rest of his pleasure out of him and doing a supremely messy job of swallowing it down. But it was all right as long as his mouth stayed where it was, where it could catch every last desperate thrust of an orgasm that blurred Draco's sight and made him want to howl. 

By the time he could let go of the table behind him, Potter had swiped his mouth clean and risen off his knees again. His jeans – a tighter, classier cut this time – revealed the outline of his own arousal to the left of the buttons. That was better. Now Draco could grasp the sense of calm he'd been looking for. Now he could take it slowly. 

Hand splayed on Potter's chest, he backed him into the hallway wall and pressed up against him. Potter swallowed. Draco kissed his mouth and leaned back again. Suck him? Pull him? Turn him around and finger him until he broke down? The indecision was another novelty for Draco, spotlighting the predictable rhythm of his recent encounters - reciprocal blow jobs; a fuck and a suck. Potter demanded something unique. And, squeezed so close against Potter that he was drifting on the rise and fall of his breathing, Draco found he wanted to stay exactly where he was.

Potter shifted to accommodate Draco's leg shoving in between his. Instantly understanding what it was there for, he thrust his hips out from the wall and ground against it. Draco popped the top two buttons on his jeans and slid a hand onto his arse to guide him into a gentler rhythm and, yes, that was just how he wanted it, Potter rocking aimlessly slow, riding Draco's thigh, a sigh in his mouth. 

It was only now, with Potter's eyes falling closed and the side of his neck wrapped in Draco's hand, that Draco could put a name to the feeling that had churned him up on the day of the photo shoot. The same feeling that, pretty much hourly over the last week as he'd recalled their encounter, had made his chest flutter like a pixie cage. Potter at his mercy. That was it. A desire that went so far back he couldn't remember its beginning. Sweet heavens, if he'd had any idea that this was the way to coax Potter into surrender, their whole history would have been turned on its head – his breath hitched at the thought of a sixth year spent putting the Room of Requirement to a very different use. Potter at his mercy. Potter under his control. Draco's sense of calm slipped through his fingers and vanished.

When Draco kissed the side of his neck, Potter's eyes flew open with a gasp that sounded like he'd been struck. Interesting. Draco kissed him again, one side of his neck and then the other, then he locked his mouth over Potter's pulse point and sucked hard. And if he didn't quite get the delirious moan he was hoping for, there was no missing the thump of Potter's head hitting the wall behind him, giving Draco more throat to suck on. He dragged his mouth over all that freshly-shaved skin, tasting bitter cologne and sweat, and Potter's pulse a few millimetres beneath was pounding so hard he could almost taste blood too. 

Potter's hips were still grinding against the top of his thigh and Draco felt a new sense of leisure. He had Potter under his hands, under his mouth, fingers fisted in Draco's shirt as he bucked about in search of better pressure on his needy erection. With mostly steady hands, he plucked open the rest of Potter's buttons, pushed his jeans down and down until he could raise his foot onto the gathered denim and shove the lot down to Potter's ankles, his thigh resuming its comfortable position between Potter's legs. He wished, in fact, that he'd taken his own trousers off earlier instead of fastening them again. He wanted to feel the warm, damp weight of Potter's balls pressed into his bare skin. He wanted-

He wanted to feel Potter come in his hand again. Simple as that. 

He caught Potter's cock in the tight sort of grip he liked himself, thumb a stiff mast along the side of it and judging by the gouge of fingers in his ribs, Potter's tastes weren't so very far from his own. 

"Good, is it?" he said in Potter's ear as he bit it. 

And _then_ Potter moaned – or close enough to it for Draco's purposes. Draco gave him a good hard stroke and went back to mouthing Potter's neck as he kept up his brisk rhythm. "Been thinking about it all week, haven't you?" One of Potter's hands scrabbled up to grip his hair, shoving his face harder into his neck. "Been thinking about this. Haven't you."

He bit.

"Mmnh!" Potter writhed under his mouth, his cock harder than ever under Draco's unrelenting fingers. And then he seemed to snap. "What do you fucking think, Malfoy? You did about a dozen things to me I've never done before, and half of them I hadn't even – oh fuck, oh fuck – Malfoy!"

He broke off, pulsing into Draco's hand, hips bucking, head snapping one way then the other in search of something to bite down on. And Draco leaned in harder as the second blast of it slipped over his fingers, dripping and needy and dirty and probably another one of those things Potter had never done with anyone but him. He revelled in every last tremor of Potter's climax. Truth be told, he was still cradling Potter's cock and mouthing the side of his neck long after the last shudders of orgasm had faded away.

Potter's eyes remained tightly closed as Draco ran his sticky hand up Potter's chest, dragging the shirt up with them. He had to get Potter naked right now. Otherwise, in the calm of receding pleasure, he might do something completely outrageous, like leave. And as Draco freed his gorgeous arms and chest, he realised that once he'd got Potter that way, it was going to kill him to see him put on his clothes again. Throwing the shirt over Potter's kit bag by the door, he dropped on one knee to deal with his shoes and jeans. Potter stepped out of them placidly – maybe the professional Quidditch life accustomed him to casual submission to the touch of medical personnel and masseurs, but Draco liked to think the compliance was something reserved uniquely for himself. The grey underpants (a limited wardrobe or a touch of nostalgia?) with the damp streak down the front he pulled back up around Potter's hips, anticipating the pleasure of taking them off again later. 

And suddenly for the second time Draco had Harry Potter mostly naked in front of him. That familiar face that often graced simultaneous covers of Witch Weekly and Quidditch Weekly, and the wanton body that no-one would have guessed lay beneath it. Draco wanted a picture of that moment, with Potter's lashes resting peacefully at the top of his cheeks, to record that he'd been the one to make Potter look this way. 

He stood, running his hand up Potter's thigh, over his stomach, his chest, up to his chin, and then he kissed him again, long and lingering. He was starting to get a fairly good idea of what Potter liked. 

**

In the kitchen doorway, Potter grabbed the back of his shirt and stopped him. A bare arm hooked around his chest and pulled him back against Potter's body, warm and hard and strong.

"Bit one-sided, don't you think?" he said in Draco's ear and if Draco's knees hadn't been shaky already, Potter's hand under his shirt quickly turned them that way, feeling up his ribs and stomach, fingertips brushing both nipples then dipping down to his navel. He let Potter push the shirt up his back, over his head, tugging it off his arms. Then he burst free of Potter's grip before the shiver building in his spine could make itself obvious. Potter didn't need to know how deeply Draco's attraction to him ran, how the pit of his stomach clenched uncomfortably with every step he put between them. Didn't need to know that, right now, Draco didn't trust himself to pick up the firewhiskey bottle without courting disaster.

"You're drinking, I take it?" Draco said, turning his back as he took his time choosing a couple of glasses from the cupboard and laid them on the table. At Potter's silence, he looked around to find himself under surveillance, Potter's gaze tracing down his ribs, skirting the band of his trousers, climbing the slivery trail of hair rising up to his navel. And – oh sweet heaven – tucked under those demure grey underpants, his cock looked like it might be filling out ever so slightly already. 

Draco took a very firm grip on the glasses. He was not going to let Potter jump him again. No matter how hard his heart beat and clamoured for it. This time, Draco was going to be the one in control. Potter would like it better that way, too. If he let Draco lead him through it, properly, with all the care and creativity of which he knew he was capable, they'd both remember his first time indefinitely.

But it was hard to be long-term about this when Potter was leaning against the door frame with his crossed arms emphasising those solid biceps, fondling Draco's chest with his gaze. 

Draco steeled himself and, with the most intense concentration he could muster, poured the drinks. A third full. The intention was to calm them both down, not jeopardise performance. Pushing one glass to the far end of the kitchen table, he took the chair on the near side, drawing his knees up to present less of a temptation with at least some of his bare skin obscured. Apparently understanding, Potter went into the kitchen to wipe his glasses on the handtowel on the pantry door and returned to take up the drink.

This was the dreaded moment Draco knew he had to steer them through, when the haze of sex had receded and the air between them felt thick with history and the sheer unlikelihood of reaching any sort of polite conversation. Trouble was, he was not a diplomat at the best of times and right now his senses were still fuzzy with the impact of orgasm and distracted by the smell of Potter's come rising off his fingers. 

Potter stood restlessly by the side of the table, strained grip on the glass. 

"Hard training session?" Draco asked quickly.

Potter's attention flicked back to him from wherever it had been. "Yeah. No. Not really."

He unclosed his fist and finally let himself drop onto the opposite chair. "It was pretty easy stuff. It should have been easy. If I'd been able to keep my mind on it." His smile looked rueful through the glass and the whiskey. "They were drilling us in how to feint without giving it away. You know, hiding all the unconscious hints about your next move."

"You need to be taught that, do you?" Draco asked, swiping a drop of alcohol off the side of the glass and putting his finger in his mouth.

"Yeah," Potter replied. "I do, anyway. I'm reckon I'm a pretty direct person usually."

"Are you?"

"Mostly."

"Are you going to let me fuck you tonight?" 

Potter blinked fast but, despite the colour rising in his cheeks, held his gaze. "I'm still here, aren't I?"

His drink disappearing in one rapid swallow, Draco slammed his glass down on the table and stared at it, taking his time. Taking his time. It could hardly be four yet and he had planned for it to be well past sunset before he gave Potter what they both wanted. He looked up as Potter sprang out of his seat.

"That's the volcano, isn't it?"

For a few moments Draco appreciated the luxury of the back view of Potter, framed in the doorway of his sitting room. Slowly he freed his mind from the trap of their previous conversation. 

"Mount Mayon." He allowed himself a satisfied smirk. "Yes." 

The photograph was a still one, no humans in it. Even so, the billowing smoke, tinged from below by the light of smouldering rock, gave such a vivid impression of impending explosion that the image appeared to be in motion.

Potter went forward into the room. Although Draco's broom had only got him a few dozen metres inside the rim – as close as was humanly possible in the intense heat and sulphurous smoke – the glowing rock compelled touch. 

"So close," Potter murmured. 

Draco didn't have a trophy room - not in the sense that his father had done, full of priceless artworks, antique sculptures, and barely legal dark artefacts. But this room with its tall bookshelves and two couches had looked bare without any indication of what Draco had accomplished with all his adult years, so he had hung it with a few pictures. To be honest, he hardly looked at the photographs anymore and when he came in here it was always for the research material he kept in the handiest shelves.

"There's so much smoke," Potter observed. "How did you find your way around?"

Coming up beside him, Draco was bemused to see Potter wearing the same eagerness he'd worn in the hallway earlier, now transformed into something much less adult. 

"Blizzard goggles under a bubble-head charm. The charm had to come off to take the pictures."

"And what about your broom? You couldn't be sure protective charms would hold with all the smoke and the heat. All it would take is one ember catching in the brush and-" Potter's shudder recalled the fact that his life depended on a daily basis on that thin stick keeping him airborne. 

"That's a trade secret," Draco told him. "I've got to keep some things quiet. If that soft-cock Lockhart can make a fortune out of his memoirs, imagine what mine would do."

"Really?" Potter said with a playful sideways glance. 

"Why not? I might do it."

And because the temptation of proximity was just too great, he settled his hand onto Potter's cotton-covered arse. 

"I see," Potter said, unflinching, and spent another long moment contemplating the photograph. "Where would you find the time to write it? Your reputation says you keep pretty busy."

And he stepped away to pick up a small frame half way up the bookshelf. Probably for the best. Being alone in a small room with an undressed Harry Potter and an implicit invitation to touch was proving a sore test of Draco's self-control.

Draco threw himself onto a couch. "Nice to know you've taken an interest in my reputation."

"Hard not to." Potter said, suppressing a smile as he stepped back to survey the whole of the bookshelf. "Charlie's mentioned you once or twice. Fondly, if you want to know."

In no way could he resent the fact that Britain's hottest export was bragging about him to family and friends. It also gave him a handy opening for an interesting question. "And you?"

"Still a bit early to decide," he muttered, taking down a book and opening it wrong side up. Sensing distraction, Draco pressed the question further. 

"I meant have you told anyone." 

Potter shrugged and put the book back. "No. Why would I?"

Draco could think of a few people, starting with Potter's on-again-off-again girlfriend and extending to pretty much every single man and woman in magical Britain, who took an interest in Potter's sexuality and how he chose to exercise it. And not that he cared much for Potter's approval, but neither was he prepared to have their encounter be thought of as a subject for shame. 

"On the other hand, why would you keep it a secret?"

His arms folding over his chest, Potter looked, for the first time, uncomfortable. "It's nobody's business."

"Oh really."

"Bloody hell, Malfoy, it's hardly even your business." Potter's scowl came out of nowhere. "Like I said, Charlie talks about you. I know how it is with you. One night – a weekend at the most – and then you're onto another face, another piece of arse, another adventure. So you've got nothing to say to me about how I manage my life. Get it?"

He wondered eagerly if Potter could be made angry enough that he'd take it out in the bedroom. He wondered for the first time why Potter hadn't gone to Weasley for whatever sexual exploration he needed to do. He wondered how badly Potter wanted to be here, and how far he could push him before it was too far. He didn't, he discovered quickly, want that last question answered. 

"Try the shelf above you. White box on the right. You'll be interested in what's inside it." 

Unfolding his arms, Potter drew it down and set it on his knee in the opposite couch, lifting off the lid. It took a little over a second to put the smile back onto his face. The photographs were arranged in the order they'd been taken at the shoot, so Weasley and his utility belt were aptly on top. 

"Yeah, all right," Potter said. "I'm interested." 

There were something like seven hundred pictures in all and Potter took his sweet time going through them. Fine with Draco. He pulled his copy of Newt Scamander's "Dragon-Watcher's Omnibus" off the third shelf and set it on his drawn-up knees, where a covert shift of focus allowed him to keep an eye on his guest. The first pictures, of Weasley, got little more than a cursory glance before being set down on the vacant seat beside him, but then Weasley was virtually family in Potter's eyes. Soon after, he slowed down, and by the time he got to where Tariq and Lynch would be, he was slouched back in the lounge, going over each shot with a critical gaze. 

"These are all friends of yours, are they?" Potter asked.

"Weasley brought most of them in, as a matter of fact." Draco looked up from a passage on nesting, a smile itching his lips. "Which one in particular?"

Potter held up a photograph between thumb and forefinger.

"Tariq was one of mine. He gave me a few lessons in carpet racing when I was training for the rally in Tripoli."

"Just lessons?"

Draco fought off the smug smile in favour of disdain. "Believe it or not, I don't spend all these thousands of Galleons and hours on my projects just to get laid. Why do you care?"

"He left a note in my bag, that day."

Draco took an interest in the text before him. The male selects a nesting site primarily for its remoteness, preferring the archetypal deep cavern not in fear of predators, of which even a newborn dragon has few, but of rivals. "Oh?"

Potter's deliberate silence irritated him, and his careful strategy of shielding his lap with the box still sitting on his thighs.

"And how was he?"

Potter shrugged, flicking to a new picture. "Wouldn't know. It'd be a good excuse to see Damascus, that's all."

The following two chapters on hierarchy and territorial combat were a bit of a blur. 

"Can I keep one?" Potter asked coolly when he'd transferred the last of them to the discarded pile beside him.

Draco held on to the breath he'd drawn to scoff with. Curiosity got the better of him. "Which one?" 

"I don't know." Potter held a photograph out. "Maybe this." It was, astonishingly, of Draco. One of the later ones from his shoot when, after the interruption of Potter's entrance, he'd flexed and arched twice as sleekly under the camera's blaze. He could tell it was one of the later shots because the swell of arousal from Potter's arrival hadn't quite died down and there were faint smudges over his cheekbones. In fact, the day after the shoot, Draco remembered putting this very picture to one side, determined to include it in his own private version of the calendar, along with the one of Weasley tightening his utility belt and about ten of Potter. Clutching hard to the possibility that he might one day have Potter here in his house, he'd put the private version on hold for the moment. 

If Potter pretended to be perfectly nonchalant about his choice, Draco could match him. "Be my guest. If you really want it."

Potter rested the photograph on the chair's arm and busied himself in replacing the rest of them in their box. There was an awkward moment as he picked up the photograph as if to slide it into his pocket which, like the rest of his clothes, was back in the hall. He started to turn the photograph around in his fingers.

"Just a moment." He nodded towards the doorway and disappeared through it. 

Draco slouched in his chair and made a long-needed readjustment to his trousers. But after the momentary relief that Potter's absence brought him, a twinge of uncertainty set in. Things had got a bit tense for a moment back there, and Draco still wasn't sure what had set Potter off, not exactly. If he could play out that moment again, he'd set aside the vanity that wanted Potter to have acknowledged their encounter to somebody else. He'd avoid all mention of any topic that might lead back to Potter's girlfriend, or to the dicey question of whether what he was doing with Draco was an idle experiment or a guilty aberration or something more than that. Possibly he'd just stumbled across Potter in a moment of curiosity. Possibly Potter was at his door right now, changing his mind. Dressing.

A glance from the kitchen doorway showed him Potter standing up from his kit bag and returning down the hall. As Potter returned, Draco slipped casually into the dining chair and topped up both of the glasses on the table with a frugal finger of whisky. In the chair opposite, Potter batted his glass from one hand to the other, restless. Draco reached out and stilled it. 

"Bored already?" He slid his bare foot between Potter's calves, up to his thighs and back down again. And there it was. That flash of astonishment that looked so good on him. The false innocence. It flared and vanished as rising desire conquered the surprise in him. Potter's hand abandoned his glass and closed around Draco's wrist.

"Not anymore." 

No mistaking the intent in his tightening grip or the sharp edge on his grin. Their gazes locked and all at once the air was thin and charged, hot blood flooding Draco's groin. Draco's lips parted and drew Potter's attention down to them, watching, hungry. He had hardly planted his feet on the ground when his mouth was meeting Potter's over the tabletop, Potter's free hand clutching in his hair to hold him still against the fierce grind of teeth and thrust of their tongues. Oh fuck. It still took his breath away to recall that virtuous, protective Potter had this in him. All it took was a rough thumb grazing over his windpipe and Potter had done it again: dragged him into a place beyond technique where all he could do was try to keep up. He bit Potter's lips and dug his fingers into his shoulder, wanting to compensate for this unbalanced feeling with physical wounds. But Potter only took it and returned it twice as hard. How, he wondered, could Potter ever have deluded himself into imagining that a woman could give him what he needed?

Draco twisted his neck out of Potter's grip and leaned back. "Let's keep it interesting then," he panted. "Why don't you come around here so I can take those off you?"

Potter did, at a maddening slow saunter that kept the bulge in his underpants out of Draco's reach for a few moments longer. Fine. Draco could play it cool too. He met Potter at the head of the table and with a lazy hand on his hip, guided their bodies into parallel. Then he kissed Potter in a different rhythm: a slower, more deliberate meshing of lips that Potter picked up instantly, hands settling on Draco's waist. Perfect. Potter's cock filled out as they kissed, stretching his underpants across the narrow gap between them to press its heated head into Draco's hip, then hardening under the friction of Draco's hipbone to straining point. 

Draco could think of a good many things he'd like to do with that hard-on. But he had the shredded remains of a plan to salvage. He slid his hand into those unpretentious underpants, over Potter's arse, a light squeeze, a testing pause, a good firm grope. Potter gave a dry swallow and – lovely – quickly lost the ability to focus on kissing. From one cheek to the other, Draco's hand brushed and wherever he touched, the muscle tensed and flexed. Potter sounded tortured, panting against his jaw, lips just grazing skin. When Draco's finger pushed its way from the base of his spine down into the damp groove of his arse, Potter pressed forward, arms tightening around Draco's waist and dragging them together. Draco trailed his finger over the textured skin until he had Potter rocking against him, eyes closed, mouth open, arms locked tight.

"Would you like my tongue in there again?"

Potter jolted like a cursed man, fingers digging into Draco's back. The heat in his face and the throb of his cock were answer enough.

"Take them off then."

"All right," Potter said, barely more than a breath.

Potter drew back slowly, eyes averted as he slid his pants down and stepped out of them, and when Draco reached out for another squeeze of his arse, he turned his head away. And Draco remembered that this was a path he would only get to walk once. Potter was adventurous and quick to learn, and what shocked him today would be commonplace tomorrow. Only Draco would get to have him here and now, full of fear and anticipation, at the mercy of his need. 

He stroked a knuckle up and down the underside of Potter's cock that strained dark and full in front of him. "Turn around," he said, low, caressing. It took a good long while before Potter could make himself do it. This time he knew exactly what he was consenting to. 

Draco went in with his hands, gripping Potter's waist just above his hips, grinding his clothed erection into Potter's arse as his hands clutched Potter's chest – he really had to leave Puddlemere something in his will for what they'd done to with the scrawny frame of Potter's adolescence. He groped and Potter writhed with his hands straining on the tabletop.

"For fuck's sake, Malfoy. Do it." Potter bent his head back over Draco's shoulder.

He was as tense as a cornered cat, part need, part nerves. Draco had a lot of work to do. His chest thumped with the thought of it. He pulled Potter back a step and guided his hands onto the tabletop, bending him. Still stroking his back, he pressed Potter down until his face rested on top of his folded arms, hinged at ninety degrees. And then the sweet curve of Potter's arse was too much to resist. He sank to his knees and parted Potter's cheeks. 

Draco had to swallow his moan. He was as clean as it was possible for a man to be down here, and that alone made Draco hungrier for him, seduced by the picture of Potter in his post-training shower soaping up his crack in anticipation of Draco's mouth. Keeping his eyes open, he gave a slow, flat lick that trailed all the way from the back of Potter's balls to the first of his vertebrae. Potter's shoulders bricked up and his thighs strained. He went in lightly at first, feathery caresses so that Potter could feel every individual touch and Draco, too, sensed every ripple of flesh under the tip of his tongue. The muscle clenched desperately wherever he touched, trailing up and down one wall of Potter's crease and then the other as the muscles in Potter's arse slowly relaxed and let Draco push them further apart. Slow circles around the hot centre of his arse made Potter grind back into his mouth – and Draco kept him there a good long while, licking lasciviously everywhere except the one place that would be all Potter could think about right now. 

When Draco took it, he preferred it fast and firm and authoritative. That was where Weasley always excelled: standing up from bestowing the deepest, greediest blow jobs of Draco's experience, Weasley liked to bend you over the nearest piece of furniture and fuck you until your legs gave out. He delivered exactly what Draco needed, as often as Draco could take it: and indeed it had taken the entire twelve-hour train journey from Brasov to Kings Cross before Draco really recovered the ability to walk straight.

But when he had another man on the receiving end of his tongue or his cock, Draco liked it slow. He liked the whole filthy process of penetrating that tight clench of muscle, teasing it with the tip of his finger, coaxing the body's defences into submission, working up his own imagination to a fever pitch. And if he wallowed in the preparation of other men, it went doubly for Potter. 

There was no disappointment in the moment when he finally gave Potter what his body was crying out for. The moment his tongue touched Potter's hole, it contracted away from him in pleasure then relaxed again in entreaty. Potter's breathing was a mess of snatches and sighs, long silences each time Draco's tongue withdrew from him; heavy breaths when it returned. 

"How's that?" he asked a little later, once he'd slipped a spit-slick finger as deep in as it would go. Potter gave a weak sort of grunt, clenching hard around it. Draco started a quick, shallow rhythm with his finger, twisting a little to brush Potter's insides and make sure he appreciated how intimately Draco was touching him. The clench around his finger just got tighter. Resting his forehead against Potter's cheek, he leaned in to watch closer, so he could see the glisten on his finger each time it withdrew, and observe the subtle loosening of Potter's resistance. 

"Potter?" has asked again, surprised to find his voice thick and unreliable. He cleared his throat. He had to hear Potter speak. He had to make sure that there wasn't anything in Potter's head except the sensation of Draco's finger and the nervous anticipation of Draco's cock. "Talk to me."

As Potter just swallowed loudly, he shoved his finger in again and paused. "Shall I stop?" 

"No!" 

Draco surrendered to a very satisfied smirk as he resumed his leisurely penetration. "So it's good then?"

A strangled _"good!"_ was all he got, but when he put his mouth back over Potter's finger-loosened entrance, Potter underscored that compliment with an unrestrained moan that wrapped like fingers right around Draco's cock. Oh shit. It was only now that he noticed how the sympathetic jerks of his own hips had rubbed his lazy arousal into hardness against the barrier of his trousers. Damp wool met his palm when he touched himself. It was a lucky thing he hadn't planned to fuck Potter just yet, because there was no way he was going to last this time around. Not if he wanted to make it the four-course banquet his imagination had planned for him. 

If it was too soon for that, he could still have the next best thing. Standing, he stripped in a few economical moves and positioned himself behind Potter, bent over him until his chin could rest on the top of Potter's back. Close enough to feel the hitch of uncertainty in Potter's chest. He took himself in hand and guided the wet tip of his cock between Potter's cheeks, giving him a good feel of the hardness of him and the state of his arousal. His hand fisted tight, stroking himself harder and milking another trickle of fluid out the head. Nice to see Potter's fingers digging hard into the tabletop as Draco grazed the dip of his arsehole once, twice and again, pausing a little longer each time, letting Potter envisage what might happen next. 

"Go on," Potter said, and Draco's mouth twitched in an echo of old distaste – always the fucking martyr, still stepping out to face pain and danger as if fear were something he'd only read about in books. Well fuck him. He shoved Potter harder against the table's edge and pressed his cockhead harder against his hole – not hard enough to get into him, but enough to make him tense with the imminent stretch of penetration. Draco's hand sped up on his cock, knuckles smacking into Potter's cheeks, slicking Potter's channel with pure anticipation. Fuck him.

"It's okay." Potter ground back against him, a hint of a growl. "I can take it."

Too late. Draco jerked and shuddered his way through a brilliant orgasm, lit with anger, breath knocked out of him as he wilted against Potter's back. He caught Potter's flinch at the spurt of semen between his cheeks, but there was nowhere he could go, pressed up against the table. Nothing he could do except take it as the hot slick of Draco's release seeped intimately over him – Draco's cock gave a final pulse of pleasure at that thought. 

"Not yet," he sighed into Potter's shoulder-blade. "Don't get impatient."

Since he felt too spent to stand, he sank on one knee and turned his mind back to getting Potter off. Now, with the pressure of desire faded, he could indulge himself, and so he did, one hand edging between Potter's thighs to stroke his balls while he lubricated two fingers in come and worked them in. The same contradiction tinged Potter's response: an instinctive recoil over-ridden by conscious submission. Draco worked his fingers quicker, wetting their tips repeatedly and shoving them in until Potter's hole was good and slick and his feet were a few inches further apart on the kitchen floor. Merlin, the hero of the wizarding world really fucking liked this. Draco acknowledged a little admiration for that. It was more than he could stand, himself, to let some man prise him apart like a whore, holding him helpless on the end of his fingers. But Potter didn't even seem conscious of his own vulnerability: he just bucked into the penetration, making it clear that he wanted it deeper and harder. Draco gave it to him – faster rhythm, a wrench of his wrist – until Potter's balls were clenched up tight with impending climax.

"Come here." Under his encouragement, Potter turned, Draco's fingers still sheathed inside him, until his erection strained up, swollen, in front of Draco's face. He made himself pause long enough to take in Potter's appearance – sweat-streaked and flushed with his hair plastered flat on his forehead and his glasses discarded somewhere. Then he closed his mouth around Potter's cock and sucked him hard and fast into an almost instantaneous climax. 

"Oh god, oh god," Potter moaned, unmanned by the dual assault of Draco's eager mouth and the renewed plunge of his fingers from the rear. His hands latched into Draco's hair without thought. His hips whipped between Draco's mouth and his fingers, pleading for more of both, jerking for the few short moments it took before he was coming, shooting hard in Draco's mouth, clutching at the unrelenting intrusion in his arse, the occasional gasp turning into a whimper as he came, Draco liked to think, harder than he ever had before. 

As Potter's fingers uncurled from his scalp, Draco guided him towards the table for support. Spent cock trailing between Draco's lips and leaving him altogether, Potter slouched backwards, hands clutching the tabletop, letting it take his weight. He knew Potter wouldn't be able to meet his eyes for a little while after losing it like that. Not the first time. And as much as he longed to see what Potter looked like just then, he didn't want Potter defensive and awkward. With a last fond lick across his glistening, contracting flesh, Draco took himself off to the bathroom. 

Behind him, a chair scraped as Potter dragged it out and collapsed into it. Draco smirked to himself in the mirror, inspecting his own swollen lips and glittering eyes. If he was feeling weak-kneed now, it was nothing compared to how he was going to feel by the time Draco took him all the way. 

**

Having lingered long enough over the simple act of washing his face and hands to give Potter a chance to pull himself together, he emerged to find him sprawled in a couch with a book in his hands, his lack of discomposure evident in the fact that he hadn't made the slightest effort to smooth down his sex-snarled hair, though he'd climbed back into his underpants.

He made a mental note to give Potter more credit for resilience. And to try to stop thinking of him as a lapsed straight bloke: it seemed a little misconceived when he was lounging about as if he spent most of his leisure time in other men's houses filling in the gaps between orgasms. 

Potter's rapid glance over the top of his glasses was cocky with confidence. "You'll tell me if you want me to leave, right?"

He flexed one foot and rolled his ankle to get it comfortable; it dragged Draco's attention to the lovely line his legs made, from one arm of the couch back to where the hair thickened at the top of his thighs. "You're good for a bit longer." 

"No plans for tonight then?"

"I wouldn't say that." Their eyes met in a flash of understanding and shared anticipation. 

Potter was smiling as he turned back to his book. "I've got a match tomorrow. Nine o'clock sharp."

**

As the windows darkened, Draco spelled the curtains closed and ramped up the heating charms to make sure that Potter wouldn't need to think of putting his clothes back on again. His own robe, which he'd slipped into in the bathroom, was already almost as much off him as on; he eased it further open across his chest and pointed his knee to get his leg free of it entirely and leaned back, for the first time all day wholly at ease. 

"They did a lot of practical work at Durmstrang, did they?" Potter asked, his attention drawn by the movement.

Interesting question. A good deal of what Draco had learned in his final year had been extra-curricular. Walking into a school full of Dark-Arts-proficient adolescent boys with the stigma of defeat upon him and no acquaintance with humility, Draco had mastered defensive magic pretty quickly. "The course was more theory than practical. They measured essays not so much by length of scrolls but by number of house-elves needed to carry it."

Potter frowned at him. "Then where did you learn all this stuff? I never noticed you duelling Lethifolds at Hogwarts."

The photograph he referred to hung above the doorway back to the kitchen. It showed Draco bound hand and foot to a stake behind him, his pale head conspicuous in the dappled light under the canopy, with the Lethifold itself no more than a ribbon of deeper blackness stirring the leaf litter on the far left. That one had been the closest call of all his projects, the peak in a series of increasingly foolhardy stunts spurred on by sudden and enthusiastic popular attention. His magic clumsy with panic, he'd dislocated both thumbs and lost a lot of skin getting himself free, and it was only now after a good eighteen months' recovery that he could countenance working with magical creatures again. He'd chosen this picture, as opposed to the later victorious one that everybody knew from the papers, for this private space to remind himself that he was mortal.

"Self-taught. It's a matter of discipline."

And that was as far as the conversation got because, shying away from the sombre topic of mortality, Draco alighted on a much more appealing one. His eyes took a leisurely stroll down Potter's body, from the nipples that crowned those scrumptious pectoral muscles, over the flat plane of his relaxed abdominals, the sleeping bulge in his underpants, and his long legs stretched out. Noticing the scrutiny, Potter made his own silent evaluation, and Draco turned onto his side so that his robe fell open to create a view worth the trouble. 

At the first sign of renewed arousal, Draco slid to his feet. 

"You can hardly play your match on an empty stomach."

Sitting forward, Potter looked like he was about to disagree quite pointedly. Draco tightened the cord of his robe. "I'll order." 

He slipped out before his resolve could falter. 

**

Twenty minutes later they were back where they'd started, eating plates of pie and chips under the mementos of Draco's old projects. They ate silently, both on edge with impatience. The clockwork reliability of the Cauldron and Kettle's delivery service had allowed him the luxury of letting Potter corner him in the kitchen and they'd got in a good, rough grope wedged against the pantry door with Potter's mouth all over him before the puff of the Floo interrupted. As he collected the basket from the fireplace and fetched plates and cutlery, he'd felt Potter's attention on his arse as he walked. Good. The more opportunity Potter got to work himself up with imaging what came next, the better it was going to be when it came.

From the corner of his eye, he watched Potter eat. Big, greedy bites of a man who didn't mind showing appetite. Plate cradled on one sturdy palm, he sucked salt off his fingertips. Draco's body responded a bit too enthusiastically to that - maybe that grope hadn't been such a good idea. Draco wanted to be in control of what they did, not avalanched along on Potter's desire. 

He put his plate aside and lay back. In full-stomached satisfaction, Potter's presence put a new sheen on this little room. The photographs that had hung unnoticed now commanded his attention as if their subject were a stranger. It occurred to him how much he had accomplished. Indeed, when you thought about it, getting Harry Potter into his bed was only a logical next step. Inconceivable that, until very recently, not one of his many and frequent thoughts about his future sexual adventures had included the possibility of Potter. 

Abandoning his half-finished meal, Potter moved to the seat by Draco's side and put a hand on his thigh, and Draco realised rather abruptly that he had run out of reasons to delay. 

Draco had wanted his first time badly enough to risk it with that ogre Pucey at the start of sixth year, and to walk away from it with no regrets, even over the days of recurring pain that followed. A week later he'd let Pucey do it to him again and, with his kneecaps thumping into the plank seats in the Quidditch shed, he'd known that if something so awful could feel so overwhelmingly right, he was never turning back. Potter, he guessed, was driven more by a sense of curiosity than the same physical compulsion. If – and this was oddly important to Draco – if Potter's walk on the wild side was going to be more than just an experiment and in fact become a permanent conversion away from the moral, the conventional and the heterosexual, then a thorough seduction was called for. And that meant giving him what he wanted, once he'd been made to want it badly enough.

"Thanks for dinner," Potter said, gaze flitting about as if searching for the obvious route to initiating more sex. Draco moved first.

He touched Potter's lips, making them part involuntarily, and traced a leisurely path over Potter's cheek, behind his ear, over his collar bone, zig-zagging down his chest – and by the time he reached the destination they both knew he was headed for, there was a handful worth the journey.

"If you're thinking about dinner, then you haven't been paying attention," Draco told him quietly, giving him a gentle squeeze through the cotton. 

Potter smiled – a one-sided twist of lips with none of his childhood innocence. "You've got my attention now."

Draco swung down onto the floorboards to kneel between Potter's feet. 

"Let's see if I can keep it."

With a familiar flex, Potter lifted his hips to let Draco undress him again. Wasting no time, he lowered his mouth and nuzzled Potter's cock, sucking it into the rigidity he wanted, feeling it fill out against his tongue. Delicious. The blow job was only a prelude – a diversion – but he hadn't had a chance last time to demonstrate his proficiency in this, and he certainly intended to make the most of it. This was where he would have started at the photo shoot, if Potter's willingness hadn't taken him so much by surprise that it swept away all sense of strategy. A lifetime of practice couldn't teach a woman how good a swipe of tongue felt _just here_ – how a twist of his lips _just there_ was enough to inspire a ragged moan. He could do this in his sleep, but it was all new to Potter. He hooked his wrists behind Potter's knees and encouraged him to the front of the couch seat, tipping him back. He'd said that he wanted more warning. This time, Draco was going to give him so much build-up he'd be begging for it by the time they went all the way.

Although any sort of spellwork was ill-advised under the distraction of arousal, a keen gay wizard developed a pretty reliable knack for summoning lube wandlessly under any number of impediments. Draco did it in a breath between sucks and trusted that Potter was just a little bit impressed. He certainly noticed the action because he parted his thighs a bit further and hooked a heel over Draco's shoulder to drag himself further forward. He was keen, then. Or he wanted to get to it quickly in case he lost his nerve. 

Still sucking gently, Draco stroked his fingertip over Potter's entrance, feeling it flinch and tighten. Oh yes, he could develop an addiction to straight boys. Potter was snug and reluctant again already, in spite of Draco's earlier efforts. How very fucking promising. He pulled his mind back from that intoxicating thought. He had to keep it methodical for now. He could fuck Potter fast and slow and rough and tender and in all four directions of the compass, but only if he kept his cool. It should be child's play. It always had been child's play with the others. It was only Potter who made him greedy and rash. But all the advantage of experience was on his side, and this time it was going to be exactly what he'd dreamed of this last week. 

"Tell me if it's too much," Draco said solicitously. 

Potter's dismissive snort was exactly the response he'd hoped for. He intended, Draco let himself hope, to shrink from nothing that Draco cared to do to him. So Draco laid it on a bit thicker. "It's not easy the first-"

Potter snapped, "Do I look like I'm worried?"

Draco took a moment to ponder that. Thighs splayed with that glorious tangle of hair cradled between them, exquisitely full balls, cock straining up his belly, Potter looked like Draco's wildest fantasies. Oh sweet Merlin, he called to exactly the same instinct that drew Draco to take on volcanoes and ghoul-infested underground caverns and deadly magical creatures. Potter just begged to be conquered.

Draco sucked his finger, too reckless for lube, and pushed it into the willing tightness of Potter's arse. Potter gasped, and he left it there until Potter's clenched breath hissed out again. This was going to be-

"How does it work with Charlie?" Potter asked in a fractionally deeper voice and dragged in another quick breath. 

Draco took his time removing his finger and screwing the top off the lubricant pot. Watching Draco's fingers wallowing in the clear gel seemed to remove Potter's power of speech. Draco laid down the pot.

"How?" Potter resumed swiftly. "Do you-"

Without warning, Draco slid two fingers into him, curling them up in search of a reaction, and Potter's hips jerked when he found the right spot. The shudder ran right through him. Beautiful. Draco stroked in and out again, brushing it on each swipe.

"Oh hell. Fucking hell! Don't stop that."

Draco worked his fingers faster and deeper as the muscle slowly loosened around them and Potter's knees stretched opened wider. His free hand ran up Potter's cock and fingered the leaking tip of it as Potter clenched his mouth tight as if it was the only way to shut himself up. 

The moment he stopped, Potter's eyes snapped open. 

"Does Charlie do that to you?"

Damn his fucking unshakable focus. "Why are you so obsessed with what Weasley gets up to?"

Potter raised himself on his elbows. "Because I'm going to do it to you later."

Draco's thighs clamped together. Potter was clearly oblivious to the fact that virtually every gay wizard in Europe would kill for the chance to be on the receiving end of his first time at anything. And here Draco was being offered another first. If this was his reward for a lifetime of passionate self-interest, then karma worked differently from how the mystical pages of the Quibbler imagined it. 

Potter drew his knees slightly closed as if he expected confrontation. "So if that bothers you at all, you'd better be upfront about it now."

Draco stood, drawing his robe closed over the hopelessly eager tilt of his erection. "Come on. This will go a lot easier in the bedroom."

Potter snatched his wrist as he turned. "Is that a yes or a no, Malfoy?"

Tugging his wrist free was useless. Potter pulled him back with the sort of strength that gave him a stomach full of anticipation. "Didn't Weasley tell you?" Draco said, making his best shot at a superior sneer. "The one word I never say is no. Anything goes." Potter's fingers, he fancied, lost their grip for just a second. "So long as you make it worth my while."

A few dazed blinks later, Potter was on his feet. "Oh, I will." 

His eyes were so bright with promise that Draco played with him a little in the sitting room doorway, backing him into the door jamb and kissing him hard until his glasses rode up and his fingers clawed at Draco's biceps. The moment his mouth got a break, Potter dragged Draco's robe off his shoulders and slid it onto the floor to make way for some gorgeous skin-on-skin rutting, mouths crashing back together, their two bellies damp and slippery. Stamina and real, bruising strength. The repellent cloud of virtue in which Potter travelled had cloaked it before. Now all Draco could think was how all the habits he'd spent his schooldays loathing – fearlessness, spirit, determination, rule-breaking – had suddenly become thrilling.

As Draco struggled free, Potter left him a dark smile and went ahead to the bedroom, finding his way effortlessly in the unfamiliar house. Draco watched him go, summoning the pot and scruffing his hair back the way he liked it. Mouth watering at the satisfying line of Potter's shoulders, back and hips, he clamped down that feeling again – that unwelcome recollection that he might not get another chance to watch Harry Potter's beautiful naked body sauntering down his hallway and into his bedroom.

He had enough tricks in his repertoire to make certain that Potter left here with no complaints. But his ego refused to be consigned to the status of "experiment", only to see Potter slip into the obvious lifestyle and succumb to the Seeker's temptation of fresh, adoring pussy. And he had to factor in the Weasley girl, whose relationship with Potter, according to the stories to which Draco had paid a great deal more attention of late, seemed to consist more of passionate clinches in dark corners and regular frosty rows than any sort of inviolable domestic union. 

The sheer size of Draco's bed and the sparseness of the furniture made the room's sole purpose abundantly clear. Potter stood at the foot of the folded blue and grey covers, hesitating. Potter's straight eyes would hardly see it the way Draco did. To him, a bed would be much more than a platform for pleasure: it would be a temple, a refuge, a sacred altar to the mirage of love. Whatever haphazard dealings Potter may have had with his own sex – and truth be told, the only hint Draco had found was a reference in last Monday's Witch Weekly to some blurry old photographs of Potter emerging from the toilets of a Ballycastle bar alongside an Irish referee – it was clear that this was going to be a good step further. 

He wrapped his arms around Potter's waist from behind. Oh bloody hell. He was strung like a wire in Draco's grasp. Surely not fear, not now. It could only be guilt. Sex in a bed must be a higher level of betrayal to his nagging heterosexual ideals than all their frantic groping on the furniture. If Potter changed his mind now, short of the bed by so narrow a gap that Draco's cock was almost excited enough to stretch across it, he was a dead man. Draco's lungs flooded with anger – Potter, who'd made his whole bloody life a study in helping the needy, could not be allowed to leave him high and dry here. Potter was too strong to force and too sober to drug. Draco did not beg, and no man could be allowed to survive who had seen him do it. 

Draco stretched his sense of calm as far as it would go as he detached himself from Potter. 

"You haven't the faintest idea what a luxury this is, have you?' he said, slipping onto the bed and sliding back across it, stretching out his long legs complacently. "It was nearly two years before I got the chance to do this in a bed."

Quite plain how that jerked Potter's focus back into the present, eyes skating up Draco's body, alive with the thought of fucking against walls, over benches, in dimly lit stairwells. Thank Merlin for his dependable sense of adventure. 

With a hesitant grin, Potter climbed onto the bed, tossing his glasses onto the table and arranging himself by Draco's side with some awkwardness, as if he wasn't sure whether to prepare for a medical examination or a flogging. The nerves in him were intoxicating. First time, Draco's heart beat out. First time. First time. 

And then the nerves were infecting him, too. All his plans were blossoming. He had Potter here, willing, consenting, even eager, in his bed. All he had to do was act. But Potter was the one who rolled onto his side and settled a questioning hand over Draco's lower ribs. Now what?

He drew Potter in for another round of those no-holds-barred kisses – he liked the way Potter got so hard and breathless on them, the way they were feeling more like a dizzy sort of wrestling as the night went on. With some persistence and a lot of coaxing – his mouth sucking down Potter's chest, into his armpit, up to the back of his neck where he bit gently until Potter's fingers were tight in his hair – he got Potter facing away from him. Then he only had to follow the trail of Potter's spine down to the warm opening that let his finger in without complaint. Oh no, Potter's mind was not changing. He wanted this. Draco mouthed his neck wetter and rougher as he stroked Potter's entrance, teasing him with impending penetration. 

"Yeah?" he breathed in Potter's ear, mostly for the chance to lean over him and find out what his face looked like now that he'd passed the point of no return. Potter reached out blindly for Draco's face and twisted their mouths together again – fuck, he was high maintenance in the kissing department. But when he'd sucked his fill of Draco's tongue, he stretched his top knee in front of him, a gift of easy access.

"What are you waiting for?"

There was a tendon somewhere inside of Draco – it seemed to connect the depths of his gut to the base of his cock – that twanged on cue every time Potter said something eager or filthy like that. Right now it was straining dangerously. Scrabbling around for the lube, he slicked his fingers in it and reacquainted them with the clench of Potter's arse. Convenient that he hadn't bothered to turn the covers back; Potter's hand flexing and tangling in them worked as a perfect pleasure indicator and he appeared to be near the top of the scale as Draco adjusted his angle and pushed in harder. 

Once again, Draco's restraint proved inadequate to keep his mouth shut. "You like that?"

He got a murmur that teetered on a moan. It was almost enough.

"No?"

"Yes!" Potter was starting to writhe now, fist closing around his cock in restrained, tight strokes. Draco allowed it for the moment. Another finger; a hitch of breath and Potter's mouth flew open. "All right. It's good. So good." 

And that wasn't enough either. If Potter had fallen apart for him, moaned and screamed his name and babbled that no man would ever fuck him as fully and brilliantly as Draco, if Potter had said every one of the crazy words Draco had imagined in his mouth in all the unrestrained moments over the last nine days as fantasy had made the slow explosion into orgasm, if he wept and begged himself hoarse, it still would not have been enough. That's how Potter was. He made you want more. He made you demand every single thing he had to give, to leave nothing for anybody else to possess after you.

"Yeah?" Draco panted, greedy. "Tell me."

Potter's hand squeezed around his cock and stilled. His face was screwed up, private, closed off, but his mouth was still open. 

"Okay." Hand tearing at the covers again; hips jerking faster onto Draco's fingers. "It's good – good not to do everything myself. Good to let you. No talking. No fucking promises. I don't have to be in love with you." Draco made very certain not to let his rhythm slip just there. "It's funny. I thought Romanian men must be pretty wretched if Charlie went on about you so much." 

Draco's fingers shoved in hard. Potter had no bloody idea how lucky he was – not just to be in Draco's bed but to be here like this, getting it careful and expert and more unselfish than Draco had been minded to give it for a good long while. With the glamour of his knife-edge career, his expensively tended body and all that squandered wealth, Draco was the summit of a gay man's fantasies – a mere week out of Draco's star-studded sexual history would leave Potter's entire experience in the shade. 

Who said he had to be kind? "You don't really kid yourself that you're going to end up with a woman, do you?" Draco said. An obstinate silence met him. Still stinging, he remembered one of the things he'd thought when he was sixteen and weighing up pride and family loyalty against the greatest certainty he'd ever worked out by himself, and he put it into a whisper. "Do you really think you could live the rest of your life without ever having this again?"

Potter turned his face into the covers, his tension cinching Draco's fingers. "No." 

No mercy: Draco kept up his insistent penetration and Potter kept lapping it up, a bit stiffer, moving a bit less sinuously, but well beyond the point where emotion or logic could distract his body from getting from what it must have been craving for a very long time. 

"Don't you want to get married?" he gasped out.

That whole word made Draco sick: his voice grew icicles. "Frankly, Potter, I think you're rushing this."

A snort of annoyance. "Well I do."

"Good for you." He knew it was an over-reaction, but his hand snapped out and away. Potter's body clearly wanted nothing but Draco: why the bloody hell did his stupid sentimental mind have to be elsewhere. "I trust your nice little wife will gladly swap her apron for a dildo when the sun goes down. Don't come to me if your marriage leaves you comatose with boredom."

"I don't mean – fuck it, Malfoy! You're harder work than-"

"I beg your pardon." The words were no more than a furious hiss of air. He knew he was dangerously close to blowing everything with Potter, but he was not – he was _not_ – going to let Potter imagine that Draco's life was some sort of second-best. Not when he'd just proved incontrovertibly that his world contained depths of pleasure that Potter could never have imagined. Not when Draco had already made him lose it twice today in a way that no woman could have done. Fuck his romantic delusions. Draco's temper had run away from him and he didn't care to rein it in. "I brought you here for a fuck – was that not clear? If you'd thought to mention that I was supposed to solve your psychological problems as well I'd have looked up Weasley instead. Or the flying carpet boy, or any of the others. Someone who knew what they were doing." 

Potter was staring at the ceiling, jaw clenching, silent. Slowly he turned to Draco

"Don't," he said, even and low. "Just don't." He went back to the ceiling, breathing slowing down. With a sniff, he fingered sweat off his forehead. "This isn't simple for me, Malfoy. It's only a couple of years since I thought I could be interested in – in men. And now I know I am. But I'm trying to work out, do I want that life, Charlie's life, fuck my way across Europe – and don't think I haven't imagined it. Or maybe it's not men in general that I want right now. Maybe it's-" 

He sat up and hooked his arms around his knees. His tired expression told Draco he'd taken a very wrong step. His goal had been teasing Potter into abandon – what use were all these bloody emotions he'd brought to the surface? Sentimental men were a lousy fuck. 

Potter looked over at him with that hard glint he remembered from their schooldays. "You tell me then. That's my choice, is it? Either a woman and a happy marriage or a whole life of one-nighters."

Potter hadn't changed a bit. He still expected to have everything. Draco gave his own cock an attentive fondle, striving for perfect nonchalance. "Like I said. I can't sort out your problems for you. But I can make you forget them if you just lie back and let me."

In the long pause, Potter's chin rested contemplatively on his arms. Then he rolled with a sigh and stretched out on his stomach, his hip coming to rest against Draco's knee. "Go on then. Do it."

But the mood had been broken. Draco had royally fucked it up. His massive advantage in experience should have made this child's play – how hard could it be to give a novice straight bloke the fucking he was all but begging for? – but Potter made him greedy. Made him grasp for things he wasn't even sure if he wanted. He should be the one setting the pace here. Instead – oh, why fight it? Instead he was going to play by Potter's rules, if that was what it took.

He shifted closer and ran his palm down Potter's back, skimming his ribs, down to his kidneys then slowly back up again to make flat-handed figures of eight over his shoulder-blades. Somewhere buried very deep he had a young child's memory of what that felt like. Soothing and safe. He took it a bit deeper, rubbing with the hard ridges of his palm. 

"That's good," Potter murmured, burrowing into the covers and getting comfortable. Maybe he was going to meet Draco halfway in mending the mood. 

Draco moved down to Potter's ribs. With the muscle relaxed, he could feel the discernible ridges of bone under his fingertips, and he followed them, up and down and around to the tender skin on Potter's flank. It was lucky Potter's face was buried in his arms, because Draco's expression probably gave away his uncertainty. But he kept up the unfamiliar caress, staying clear of anything erotic, feeling how Potter got more and more pliant under his touch. 

Potter's rules. He was going to play by Potter's rules and win. There was nothing that the Weasley girl could do for him that Draco couldn't improve on; plenty of things that were beyond her imagination entirely.

He kissed the back of Potter's neck, brushing the hair aside with his lips. Another kiss, and another, tracing a path up to Potter's earlobe and onto his cheek, stilling his hands so that Potter's full attention was on his mouth. Potter shifted onto one side, but caution didn't stop his breath going puffy between them as Draco parted his lips and flicked his tongue between them, slowly   
tracing over his front teeth, stroking between his gums and the inside of his lips. As Potter wriggled onto his back and tried to force their mouths together, Draco held him down and nipped at his lips with tiny, patient kisses, covering his jaw too. There was nothing – absolutely nothing – a woman could do to him that Draco couldn't do better. As Potter's grip on his arm grew painful, Draco continued over his cheekbone, kissing his eyelids and the bridge of his nose. 

"What are you doing to me?" Potter groaned. In one fluid move, he threw Draco onto his back and rolled on top of him, mouth immediately finding Draco's again and resuming the kiss, harder and hungrier. Draco's nerves blazed at the sudden application of brute force, leaving him helplessly immobile for a moment and scrambling all his plans into one desperate thought: _yes, Potter, for fuck's sake, more of that_. As Potter's kiss swallowed his whimper and Potter's muscled arms pressed his chest into the mattress, the desire in him flared incoherently: _take me, hold me down, fuck me till I beg for it_. Potter's leg had driven itself between his thighs and they were grinding together now, rough and painful, as Potter kept up the kissing as if the orgasm he wanted so badly could be eaten straight out of Draco's mouth. And no – it couldn't be like this. Draco couldn't wait until tomorrow to get his cock into Potter. He had to-

"Stop!" He wrenched his head away, slid his fingers over Potter's mouth. "Stop it!" He had to grind the words out again, voice hopelessly strangled as Potter bit the tips of his fingers and drew them into his mouth. He was so close, Potter's cock was so hard against his hip, the excitement of being pinned under Potter was making him dizzy and his throat was so tight the words almost wouldn't come at all. "No! Stop it. _Harry_."

Stillness, finally. Potter's forehead resting on his temple, ragged breath in Draco's hair. His thumb stroked Potter's bottom lip, getting a swift swipe of Potter's tongue that jangled the nerves right down to his cock. They stayed like that a long time, the fever subsiding to a level where he almost trusted himself to speak. 

"Sorry," Potter said, ragged and slurring. "A bit much, wasn't it? I guess – this is all so different. I'm still working out what the rules are here." He kissed Draco's temple and Draco seized his hair to hold him there. 

"Promise me-" He had to close his eyes to make himself say what he'd never been able to find the words to say to a lover before. "Promise me you'll do that again. Next time. It's not too much."

There were two awkward words in there he hadn't really meant to say. But they were out there now. And Potter had taken on a new level of stillness that was either relief or revulsion. Whichever it was, Draco opened his eyes in the drawn out silence to meet it head on.

Potter had raised himself on one hand to look at him, mouth screwed up in thought. And all Draco could think was that he looked beautiful when he was worked up like this – his unmatchable green eyes dark with desire and framed with damp black lashes, lips flushed, skin glistening, hair all over the place. And under it all, his invincible jaw.

Potter picked a black hair from Draco's cheek and discarded it. The thump of Draco's heart was getting ridiculous, waiting, his hips still pinned under Potter's weight. Potter hadn't been startled by anything Draco had said or done so far. It would be so fucking unfair if this one thing Draco wanted – so badly wanted – proved to be the thing that frightened him off. 

"No promises." Potter's gravity fluttered into a soft laugh. "It's not like I know what I'm doing."

"You seemed to be finding your way all right." That won him a brief, dazzling smile.

"Um," Potter faltered, and dipped his head to nip at Draco's jaw. "Can we- The waiting's getting a bit much."

Draco laughed and found Potter's mouth. However they came out, there were no sweeter words in the world than "fuck me". They meant the end of teasing, the end of all that tedious sentimental negotiation. They meant pleasure and submission. They meant two bodies with one selfish aim. 

"Hands and knees then." He met Potter's eyes as he said that, looking for the shocked recoil, but now he saw nothing but anticipation. Perfect. 

No shame in the way Potter arranged himself either: knees wide apart, arse curving sweetly up. Under compulsion, Draco slicked up his fingers again and parted Potter's cheeks to get to the tender muscle between them, watching his work hungrily as he gave him one last stretch to make it easier. How obscene to feel Potter relax and let him in, mastering his instinctive resistance at the end of the long evening like a back-alley rentboy. This was precisely what Draco had built up to: raw eagerness, electric anticipation, no trace of fear left. Fuck he was good. 

Despite the stillness, they were both panting hard as Draco palmed his cock, going liberally with the lube. Against all expectation, having Potter vulnerable in front of him silenced his instincts for gloating or revenge and channelled his desire into one single-minded mission: make Potter wild. 

There was a faint line marring Potter's skin by the base of his neck, where the slight colour of the professional flyer joined his natural whiteness. Draco found himself fixated on it, mind infused with the smell of exertion, the thrill of unbroken height, the wind and the empty sky and the adrenalin of competition, as he steadied himself and pushed in. 

Potter's breath burst out of him and clenched back in. "More," he whispered, knees shifting apart. 

As he pressed a little harder, Potter opened up to his intrusion and let out a low growl. And Draco was barely even inside him yet – he hadn't given Potter anything hard enough to get excited about. Potter was just getting off on the pure sensation of having another man's cock in him, the pressure and heat, the dirty pleasure of it. There was no way he was going back to the straight life, not with the way he was curving his back, pressing into Draco's cock, upping the pace of penetration. 

He only ever asked this question when he was certain of the answer. "Shall I stop?" 

"You had bloody well better not," Potter said with great care.

"Shall I keep going?"

"Fucking hell, Malfoy." 

His name on Potter's lips was magic – the last syllable had a hint of a moan in it. Draco eased himself out and in a little, giving Potter's muscles one last chance to relax. Then he gave one good hard slam, drove right in and held it as he felt Potter's knees buckle underneath him, heard the groan of pleasure and felt the tremors over his back as the sensations shuddered through him: bliss, pain, vulnerability, need. 

Potter's transparency, which had goaded Draco through six years of school, had finally evolved into a shining virtue. When he mistrusted you, it showed. When you were beneath his contempt, it showed. When he pitied you, it showed. When he was blissfully spitted on your cock, so far submerged in sensation that it outstripped his old scale of pleasure and left him wholly at the mercy of his senses, he showed every bit of that too, and Draco was giddy with it. His first time – the memory of his own first time reawakened in him – vivid and sudden. Bloody unbearable Potter. He was like ... he was like the fringes of a fucking storm, infecting everything in his path with pressure and vibration and whipcords of wind. He made you feel what he felt. He made your senses pin-sharp – made your vision sparkle like a dusted window.

Slick and tight, fully sheathed, Potter's back flexing under him. Breathe, Draco. Keep it together. He managed to hold it for a moment before his plans went up in smoke again and then he was gone. Driving into Potter, all depth and yielding flesh, no fancy rhythm tricks, no showy working of angles. Plain, amateur, desperate humping. Potter braced himself as Draco took him, arse and thighs strong and steady, but as the pace stepped up, his panting got louder, more vocal, and he tipped his hips up to get the impact he wanted so badly.

"Fuck!" Potter was moaning, a pleading edge on it that no-one outside the bedroom would ever hear from him. "Oh, fuck!" Draco wanted to kiss him as he came; drink up those beautiful, helplessly spilling words; shove his tongue into Potter's mouth to possess as much of him as possible. Forehead drooping down to rest between Potter's shoulder-blades, he just kept up the desperate pace; deliberate, swift strokes as Potter's hand shot down between his legs and tugged. 

Potter's orgasm swooped down and swallowed him up. Trembling in his shoulders, tendons raised like thick scars, shudders running down the length of him as his throat clenched around a helpless cry, Potter came like he did everything else: with every last thing that he had. Draco kissed his shoulders and fucked him through it, gentler if unrelenting, keeping up the movement to make sure every moment of intense pleasure was marked in his memory with the thrust of Draco's cock. He was still shaking after the pulses of ejaculation had faded away, as his elbows betrayed him and he sank slowly into the mattress. 

Draco was teetering on the edge, far too tormented to stop. Wedging himself between Potter's thighs, he found a faster rhythm. More resistance from this angle, a tighter clench, and Potter's face was turned to one side to display his exhilarated expression, his hair dark with sweat and his skin all glistening alive as if in the triumph of a down-to-the-wire victory. So close. So perfect. Beneath his hips, the sweet cushion of Potter's arse cheeks easing him in, giving him his way. He had to have one thing more – one palm stroked up Potter's back, hugged his shoulder, ran out to take a fierce grip around his bicep, clutching hard, glorious muscle and he slipped into orgasm, jerks of pure pleasure driving him on as he strove to get in deeper, harder. Over Potter's muffled murmur, he spilled himself, satisfaction conquering him muscle by muscle until he was empty and exhausted.

"Oh yes," Potter whispered, and that was all. 

Collapsing over Potter's back, sweaty and dizzy and radiating heat, he let his cock slip free. His ears were ringing. The rise and fall of Potter's breathing was rocking him into a contented daze. Damned if he was moving. Damned if he was moving ever again. Harry Potter belonged to him. It was, finally, enough. 

**

Some time much later, a mosquito-twitch on the surface of very deep sleep told him that Potter was leaving the bed. He was too far under to do the slightest thing about it. A much stronger inkling roused him again shortly afterwards. Potter's cold feet touching his. Potter's hand on his stomach. Potter's shaggy head brushing his shoulder. He sank under again. 

**

Still drifting with sleep and half-hard already from Potter's nearness and whatever dreams his presence had inspired, Draco's general sensation of well-being solidified as he woke into the more specific knowledge of being pinned under Potter's body. More specifically still, Potter had trapped both his hands against the pillow and was teasing his ear with the faint tip of his tongue in a most distracting manner. 

"Hi," Potter murmured – no doubt noticing exactly how that gravelly morning voice put a throb in Draco's lazy arousal that was quickly heating up between them. He took Draco's earlobe gently between his teeth and nibbled. Oh fuck. Draco's sleep-addled brain didn't have the slightest defence against this sort of seduction. Lazy arousal became rock-hard need with a couple of well-aimed thrusts of Potter's hips.

Glorious slow, steamy morning-after sex. He'd forgotten how good it was with his conscious mind all blurry, his senses heightened and his impulse control non-existent. He let Potter keep up that commanding roll of hips as he made a struggle to free his imprisoned wrists – a struggle exactly faint enough to get him a stronger grip and a good flex of Potter's shoulder muscles. His pride didn't have a chance against that. He eased his thighs apart and wrapped his feet behind Potter's knees. 

No words. Not even much in the way of action, apart from Potter's mouth moving down to the hinge of his jaw and sucking gently. All that mattered was their two arousals, trapped and slippery, their solid heat radiating into his stomach. And Potter's gorgeous heavy balls in their wiry tangle of hair weighing down between his legs. 

Oh hell. This was not over – the realisation fell on him as Potter's pace got purposeful and his own hips jerked up in answering need. He was going to want Potter to fuck him. And not just that. He wanted to take Potter through the whole encyclopaedia of sexual possibility, leave nothing for some other man to teach him. 

Potter sighed into his ear, hot breath, bristles brushing his cheek. In an instant, Draco's hands had jerked free and clenched around him, one lost in the spectacular mess of his hair, the other following the flex of shoulder muscle as he bucked. He turned his face away, giving Potter free range over his neck and closing his eyes to intensify the pleasure tightening in him. Right on the edge. Potter bit, and that was all it took: one greedy scrape of teeth right around the side of his throat, hot tongue in its path, and his cock was pulsing between them, reducing him to helpless jerks as his fingers tore in Potter's hair to hold back all the other reactions bursting out of him. Potter groaned and kept biting, kissing, tonguing his way back to Draco's ear. Draco held tight to him, head clear enough to hear the wild edge to his panting, feel how his cock sought out a harder surface to bring him off. 

Draco's heel made a slow journey from the back of Potter's knee, tracing the moist skin between his thighs. Potter gasped as it neared its destination. Then swiftly Draco pressed it up between Potter's cheeks, hard enough to remind his aching muscles of last night's penetration, and that was enough to launch Potter into orgasm, shuddering and murmuring into Draco's ear.

With Potter's face buried in his neck, Draco's arms tightened reflexively, clasping him possessively as the last of the tremors shook him and faded away. And then there was the sweet weight of Potter's body settling back on top of him, heavy with muscle, spent with pleasure, all Draco's, for now. 

Potter grinned wryly as he eased himself up, at the dishevelled state of them both and the slick of semen that clung between their bellies. Without the help of vision, his outstretched hand caught his wand and the quick tingle of a cleaning charm swept over him. There was something terribly final in the act of Potter reaching for his glasses. 

"I have a match," he said. "I'm half an hour late for warm-up already."

"Go on then." His chest was drenched in Potter's cooling sweat and he was not in the mood for dragging this out.

He didn't even bother to watch the sway of Potter's arse walking out of the room. 

A few minutes later, Potter was fully dressed and leaning in his doorway.

This time he didn't look clean. Hair knotted, skin shiny and stretched, lips swollen, this time he looked like a man who'd spent the whole of last night getting the fucking of his life. Draco pulled the sheet up to his waist.

"So do you want to do this again?" Potter asked.

The jolt in Draco's breastbone wanted to answer for him. "You're a bit bloody keen aren't you?"

"How's Monday?"

Potter was just too fucking much. "Don't you have a girlfriend?"

"Aren't you going to Romania?"

"That's hardly the same thing!"

Potter's voice rose, getting hoarse. "You're damn right it's not. Ginny's not going stop me doing this but you're going to find it pretty hard to fuck me from a thousand miles away. I'd say that's a pretty bloody big obstacle, wouldn't you? When are you leaving?"

Draco shrugged irritably. "It's not set in stone." 

"When?"

"Whenever it suits me," he scowled and, since he'd already let Potter take this conversation further than he intended, he rolled over and turned his back.

"Good," Potter said firmly. "That won't be any time soon."

Draco refused to turn at the sound of his kit bag hitting the floor, or the subsequent rustling. The bed dipped as Potter knelt on it. As the sheets slid down to his knees, he spared a disdainful glance over his shoulder.

"You're fucking weird, Potter."

Potter's voice was all smirk. "It got your attention last time, didn't it?"

He smoothed his hand over Draco's arse and applied the Muggle quill, slower and more carefully this time, as if taking pride in his penmanship. Draco drew comfort from the fact that his cock was in no condition to display the depth of his interest in Potter's molesting hands and his temporary ink brand.

"There," Potter said, winding up with a flourish. "Owl me. Or take your chances on my doorstep again. I don't mind a surprise."

He left one last kiss in the dip of Draco's shoulder, his chin warm and tingling with bristle as he lingered. 

**

Only a short time after the closing of the front door, Draco found himself standing at the mirror on his wardrobe, deciphering the reversed writing. 

It turned out to be Potter's schedule. Training Monday to Friday until five. Wednesday mornings off. Matches Saturday or Sunday. Tuesday nights not before eight. "Other times," he'd written with his free hand curved over Draco's hip-bone, "anything you like."

And under it, the name Harry stood out larger than all the rest. Capital letters. Bloody eager as ever. 

Turning to face the mirror, Draco looked, frankly, fantastic. His skin was lit with a sheen that no charm could fake – lips flushed, wide irises blue-tinted and sparkling, and he could never get his fine hair to take on that just-fucked tangle by design. If he'd looked this good on the afternoon of the photo shoot, he'd have put himself on the front cover and had no use for Potter at all.

He turned side-on. It was true. He'd never looked better – the neat curve of his arse tapering up into his slender waist, the swell of his chest just enough for a whiff of physical power, and all his long limbs suggesting effortless agility. Dragon-riding was hardly going to be a challenge. He was a god. He'd tamed Harry Potter, after all.

Notwithstanding his newfound divinity, he gave himself an easy afternoon of cataloguing route maps for the journey, because pretty much his entire body ached and, every time he blinked, Potter's face wavered in his mind: eyes bright, lips parted, lost in pleasure. 

**


	3. Claws that catch: The fierce beast in his lair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lilithilien for the spot-on beta.

Draco had made it his signature to move through life fast. 

That was how people thought of him: skipping from a broom-meet in Alexandria to negotiations with a Horntail breeder in Astrakhan, a stop in Rome long enough to look up a bloke he'd met at a duelling exhibition in Warsaw and then a long slow cocktail somewhere with a view over London. Agility was a necessary trick – a magician's sleight of hand that distracted the world from recalling all the history and rumour that marred his family name. Constant activity was a habit that kept his mind occupied in surface concerns – currency conversions and safety charms and materials sourcing and endless research. He had made himself a master of the dizzying heights detail. And if he descended to the mundane long enough to recall the existence of the ground below and the comfort of having his feet planted on earth, that was the moment for a new project to launch him back into flight.

It was disconcerting to find himself at home late on a Friday night, bent over meteorological maps of the Urals, the room dark beyond the magically enhanced brightness of the candle in front of him. His research had always fitted into odd hours, sometimes stretching over sleepless nights as he wrestled the facts into a practical solution. That was not strange. What was odd was his faltering ability to analyse the information in front of him. High pressure systems made him think of rain-soaked Quidditch matches and rain-soaked male bodies in rain-soaked close-fitting uniforms. The picture of his knees gripping either side of a dragon's spine brought to mind a wholly different sort of ride. And it was an unfortunate twist of history that any mention of storms drew him inevitably back to last Wednesday night with lightning playing outside the window as Potter rode him on his bedroom floor in the dark.

He was conscious of the sort of itch in the depths of his balls that was not going to abate until something was done about it. He needed a good quick, rough fuck. Potter's name wasn't the only one he thought of, but admittedly it was the first. 

It was too late for all of that. He had to stop pissing about if he wanted to get to Romania before the winter made the dragons sluggish and reclusive. This thing with Potter had been a lovely diversion, far more exciting than he would ever have hoped, even after the fourth, the fifth, the sixth encounter. But that sort of fever just couldn't be sustained. Every affair had a shelf-life, after which it disintegrated into sad, humdrum, better-than-nothing coupling. It had to end now. Now, while the thought of Potter was still enough to make the breath quicken in his throat. While they could both walk away with the sort of memories that might never be surpassed. He'd already made that clear to Potter. All that remained was to make it clear to himself. 

He carried the candle to his bedroom, blew it out and undressed. 

He couldn't have snatched more than an hour or two of fitful sleep when a thumping on the front door woke him up. Dazed with inadequate rest, he fumbled his morning robe off the wall hook and knotted the cord.

"What?" he snapped from the inside of the door.

"It's me." Interesting that his unsatisfied cock recognised the voice an instant before his brain did, and throbbed. He rubbed his eyes and ruffled his hair to make the most of the sleep-scruffy look, then he reached for the handle.

On the landing was Potter, smelling like he'd swum across a lake of firewhisky to get there, and not looking much better. 

"Hi," Potter said. In his usual illogical way, the hesitant smile brought a light into his eyes that was all openness and innocence, the healthy sheen of apple skin. Draco appreciated the irony of that next to the state of the rest of him. He looked, indubitably, like other men had handled him. 

"Rough night," he went on, swaying slightly on the doorstep. "Can I come in?"

He dodged past Draco and into the hallway, surprisingly quick for a man in his condition. Draco's jaw clenched in the cloud of debauched scents he left behind him. Alcohol. Cheap soap. Other men. 

"If you want a potion you can make it yourself," he shot at Potter's retreating back, watching hard for any sign that Potter's stride looked uncomfortable, annoyed at his relief to find it didn't.

When he got to the kitchen, Potter was slumped on a stool, eyes fixed on the floor as if taking particular care not to fall on it. As Draco put the lights on, the evening's toll made itself plain. Tired lines standing out around his eyes, hair dull and limp, stains around the neck of his t-shirt, glasses smudged with substances Draco refused to acknowledge. He barely moved while Draco, despite himself, made a pot of chamomile tea and dropped in a few choice ingredients of his own.

The hot mug in Potter's hands appeared to revive him. Red-rimmed eyes lifted to meet Draco's and drifted away.

"Fucking hell," he said once he'd moistened his throat a bit with tea. "I don't know how many blokes sucked me off tonight."

"Well done." Draco's edge of bitterness drew Potter's gaze back to him, slow and stunned.

"Three of them on me at a time. I – fuck." He clutched the mug hard in both hands and bent over it. Something about the curve of his neck suggested pain.

"Did one of them hurt you?"

"What? No."

"Then what happened?"

Potter shook his head, glasses misting up with tea steam. "Nothing. That's the thing. Nothing."

Draco had shallow reserves of compassion at the best of times, and this was not turning out to be the best of times, with Potter smelling like a brothel and now being evasive about the reason. "Really? Then I can't imagine why you look like you spent the night lying in a gutter in Knockturn. Nice gesture to do it in the team shirt, too. You're trying to get yourself sacked for misconduct, I take it."

Potter's head jerked around, a weathervane for his state of mind in his drunken haze, and he dumped his mug on the counter. Draco moved it into the sink as it tottered, before it could fall. 

"Yeah. No. I didn't think it through very ..." He looked miserable. It was almost satisfying. "Listen, can I have a shower?"

Once again, he stumbled off the stool and out of the room to fend off a negative answer. 

"I'm not a bloody late night hotel, Potter!"

"I know," came the distant reply. 

Draco summoned his wand to vanish the rest of the tea and clean the pot. The table was a muddle of maps and pins and face-down books and the mess irked him all of a sudden. Since he was awake whether he liked it or not, he tore up some parchment strips to make bookmarks, producing a pleasing rip in the quiet room. The books he slammed one by one into a pile, shoved them hard against the wall to get them even, and rolled the maps so he could cinch them with string, all while Potter took his time under the shower. There was probably a lot to wash off him, if he'd been to the sort of place Draco imagined and demonstrated the sense of adventure Draco knew first hand. Draco sat down, opened the top book at the first page, and read. Meteorology had never been a greater trial.

When there was no sign of Potter for a few minutes after the water had stopped running, Draco closed his book and dumped it on the pile. The bathroom was blurred with steam and strewn with Potter's clothes. A square plastic packet protruded from one pocket of his jeans – so he'd been fucking Muggles, as if it could be worse. He found Potter in his bed. Curled up with his back to the door, arms wrapped around a pillow, only one muscled shoulder and the usual mess of his hair showed above the covers. His glasses were on the table, sparkling. Draco stared hard, calculating the most humiliating way to throw him out. 

"Hi," Potter mumbled and rolled onto his back, peering at Draco's silence as his sleepy contentment dissipated. He drew himself up on his elbows. "What? It's not like you don't get anything out of it." 

He threw back the covers and Draco's displeasure vanished as quickly as if the draught from the billowing sheets had blown it away. Potter was clean and naked and welcoming, with his legs parted very slightly in invitation. Not a bone in Draco's body wanted to resist, leaving his pride in a minority of one. If he didn't do something about it, his cock was going to stiffen like an indicator, pointing straight for Potter. 

"This is the last time, Potter," he said as coldly as he could. "I've got work to do. I don't want you dropping round here on a whim, whenever you happen to feel like it."

"Okay. Understood. But I'm here now." The slurring had gone out of Potter's voice and he was watching Draco intently as he toyed with the cord of his robe and, finally, pulled it loose. The robe pooled on the ground. Potter shifted across the bed to meet him as he sank on to it and reached immediately for Draco's neck, drawing him into a kiss. 

That first taste did him in. Potter was clean again, he tasted of peppermint – Draco's toothpaste – his teeth gleaming smooth, and Draco's sleep-gritty tongue plunged possessively into the cool depths of his mouth. It took a hard bite of Potter's lower lip to hold back his groan. However much of Potter he had, there was always something new he longed to go back for. They tangled together on his bed, arms clutching hard as the kiss went on and on. It had been years since he'd wanted to kiss so deeply that he lost himself in another man's mouth. Potter did that to him. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him. He put up no resistance as Draco pinned him among the pillows and had his way with his mouth, working himself good and hard against Potter's stomach. He'd never yet been able to find anything that Potter didn't like. Potter got off on the very act of taking risks, of letting go, and that made everything fair game. Nothing could have been worse for Draco's powers of self-control.

Potter blinked up at him, bright-eyed, as he pulled back.

"That's better," he said, his flushed lips flicking into a smile. "Cleared my head nicely."

And he hooked Draco back in for another round. Potter made free with his hands this time. In the lulls when the heat went out of their kisses, he felt the flat of Potter's palm rubbing his lower back, sliding down onto his arse, climbing back up again to turn into slow fingers tracing his ribs. Potter was getting better at focusing on more than one thing at a time. But that might just be because he wasn't distracted by anything much in the way of arousal. He was half-hard at best. 

When he reached for it, Potter shook his head and gave an awkward sort of murmur. "Rough night, remember?" He ran his hand down Draco's neck to his shoulder and pushed. "Lie back."

And there it was, right on cue: the flare of desire that ran through him whenever Potter took control. Whenever Potter made it plain that, far more than idle curiosity, this was something he openly wanted. He let Potter guide him onto his back and lay his legs straight, hand wandering a little as it explored the tender, tightly stretched skin over his hipbones and carded through the gathering of hair that ran down from his navel. Someone like Weasley would have got him off twice by now and either passed out on his couch or walked out the door. Why in the name of everything holy was Potter not content with that? Why did he always have to think he was entitled to more?

Shifting down the bed to lie over Draco's thighs, Potter looked down and sucked his lips. One of Draco's hands took a precautionary grip on the pillow beside him. A hungry blow job undid him like nothing else and the sight of Potter doing it, with his famous indomitable mouth and his determined eyes and his dusting of day-old dark bristle, it hadn't lost one whit of the thrill of the first time he'd done it. His cock was throbbing hard already, as if it could edge its way closer to the warm comfort of Potter's mouth. 

Potter met Draco's eyes once – a glance too quick to be read. Then he bent down slowly and kissed it. He kissed the sticky tip of Draco's cock, and as his tongue flicked out to clean his lips, the edge of it fluttered over Draco's over-sensitised skin. And Potter kissed it again, trailing his lips through the slick of fluid. Draco's hand clawed in the pillow. Potter was going to take all fucking night over this and he wasn't sure if he could stand it. 

When Potter dragged his top lip over the glistening head, moist and soft and slow, Draco had to hold his hips forcibly down on the bed. It was killing him, but it was his own bloody fault. Potter was only doing was what he'd learned at the end of Draco's tongue. It was simply that, being Potter, he had to see if he could do it better. And that, Draco realised with no little surprise, was the first competition between them that he thought he could bear to lose. 

Potter was making a good, thorough job of tonguing the crown of Draco's cock, searching out every last nerve ending and making it jangle. He sucked the head with the plush inside of his lip, he played the tip of his tongue into the slit until Draco writhed, and all the while he watched his work with an intensity of expression that suggested the pleasure in this was all for himself. He never once stopped longer than it took to suck his lips clean and get his mouth full of the taste of Draco's arousal. He just licked and sucked with slow deliberation. Sweat was soaking Draco's scalp and he'd barely even been touched yet. 

There was no disguising his reaction when Potter looked up to observe the effects of his ministrations. His chest damp and gleaming, his face heated, his breathing laboured, he must have looked as desperately turned on as he felt. 

"I should do this more often," Potter said, his voice as lazy and gentle as the strokes of his tongue had been. Luckily for him, Draco's chest was too tight with need to muster any sort of retort, and before he could get his breath back, Potter was back at work, stepping it up to another level. 

This time it was his tongue making light, quick, vertical stripes, working up from the base and getting slower and harder as he went. Draco's free hand tangled in the sheets to hold back from tearing Potter's hair. It was far too much sensation, and not nearly enough. He needed the hot, engulfing pressure of Potter's whole mouth and his hips jerked up off the mattress in entreaty. When Potter stopped and opened his mouth over the base of Draco's cock, sucking hard with his nostrils buried in wiry hair and full of the scent of Draco's crotch, it broke him. Writhing in arousal and frustration, he tore a fingernail in the sheet. He'd never had a man with the determination to hold him on edge for this long. He'd never have hoped to find such a wanton love of cock in Potter. 

"That's enough," moaned a stranger's voice in his mouth. 

His eyes were screwed shut but he could feel Potter looking at him. Triumph, concern, desire – he never knew what to expect. In the absence of all contact, his cock ached and he prayed that Potter would get back to it before he had to beg for more.

"Sorry," Potter said. He kissed the tender skin over a vein, and it jerked as if Potter had it on a string. Then he hooked his fingers around the base to stand it up straight and he swallowed it down.

Oh fuck. As the liquid heat of Potter's mouth flowed down his cock, Draco would have groaned if he'd had any breath to do it with. None of his muscles worked except the ones in his buttocks and thighs that pushed his hips up in desperate jerks, seeking more of Potter's warmth. By the time Potter had the head of it lodged hard against the top of his throat, Draco's eyes had rolled back in his head and as Potter went still around his mouthful, it became evident to both of them that Draco was trembling badly. Potter made a pleased sort of murmur deep in his throat and that would have brought Draco off there and then except for the quick work of Potter's fingers, recognising the movement and clamping tight around the base, holding him back. 

Leaving a long moment for Draco to get a grip on himself, Potter drew back and slid his mouth down again, slower than ever. Draco was transfixed by the sight of it, the strain of Potter's shoulders holding his head at that awkward angle and the tension in his jaw. He kept it simple: long, patient strokes up and down, taking away the pleasure of heat and pressure then giving it back again. Constant sensation at just the right speed to leave it at that. The too-slow rhythm lost its frustration in constant repetition. It started to get soothing. 

He let his eyes fall closed again, familiar enough with the sight of Potter bent over his groin that he could play it in his imagination while he drifted on the hot suckling sound of Potter's mouth around his cock. Better than music, the rhythmic squelch of flesh, the faint creak of the mattress with each jerk of Potter's shoulders. He realised distantly that his sense of urgency had quieted down. The pure sensation of Potter's mouth was enough for him. In good time, he'd want the frantic build-up to orgasm, but for now he could let this moment stretch on all night, wrapped in Potter's mouth, pinned down by Potter's weight, certain in the knowledge that Potter was not going to stop until he was satisfied.

Potter stopped. Draco's eyes snapped open and he glared down in disbelief, ready to spit at him that he'd taken this well past the time and place for teasing. The words caught in his mouth. Potter looked so alive with arousal that Draco was half tempted to forget his cock and drag Potter back up for another one of those deep-tongue kisses he liked so much. Bright eyes, gleaming skin, red lips, Potter's unexpected beauty took Draco's breath away. 

"Sorry," Potter said again, rubbing hard at the hinge of his jaw. "It really hurts. Where's your wand? You could do a numbing charm or-"

And forego the pleasure of knowing Potter was tasting and feeling every contour of Draco's cock? "No. I'll wait."

Potter managed a smile. Then he found something new to do. He bit softly at the underside of Draco's shaft, an insistent drag of his teeth over impossibly swollen flesh, and since the reaction was another helpless leap, he kept it up, rolling his jaw between nibbles to work the strain out. Draco watched it all, the curl of Potter's body resting on his thighs, the concentration in his face as he planned each new caress and put it into action, the parting of his lips revealing white glimmers of teeth, and beneath them the dark head of Draco's cock straining hard up his belly. By the age of twenty-one, he'd fucked more men than he could count in every position he could contort himself into. It shouldn't be possible, now, to reduce him to a state of awe at the power of two men's bodies coming together. It was just sex. No matter that, with the same idealism he applied to all his many causes, Potter might want to elevate it into something more. It was just sex, and so what if he and Potter happened to do it particularly well together? So fucking what? 

Potter was flexing his shoulders as well, giving each limb a quick stretch like the professional athlete he was, and Draco understood that this was the final stretch: this time Potter was going to give him what he wanted. He didn't know how long they'd been at this. Long enough for Potter's hair to dry and the sheets to bunch in damp folds under his back. Long enough for his mind to get foggy with oxygen drought. Long enough for all the tension to drain out of his muscles, flowing into his balls and cock so that the rest of him was as loose as draped silk, so languid that if Potter wanted to fuck him afterwards he'd be able to slide in with nothing more than a swift slick of lube. It must be contagious, Potter's love of giving himself up to another man's control. He was floating on it right now, folding both arms behind the pillow so that Potter could have him however he wanted. 

"Right," Potter said, flinching a bit in the stillness as he never did when he was in action. 

"Right," Draco repeated as he got a firm grip on the pillow, because he was so worked up now that his balls were as tight as knucklebones tugging up into his body and once he got going it would barely take more than a breath from Potter to make him come. 

Granting himself one last moment's indulgence, Potter rested his nose against the line of Draco's cock, lips brushing the base, breathing deeply – Draco had to flick his gaze up to the ceiling rather than watch that overpoweringly carnal moment – then he tilted it back up again and put it to his lips. 

The first wash of Potter's mouth over his deprived flesh pulled an unwilling sigh out of him. The rhythm was slow again but this time he could feel Potter building it. The first strokes took their time to allow Potter's tongue to twine around the head as he rose, never quite losing contact completely before he sank back down. A good long stretch of those lingering, fluttering strokes until Draco's hips started to jerk impatiently and then Potter got down to business. 

The pace quickened: short sucks around the head followed by a longer, deeper stroke, a steady pattern that had Draco arching up in anticipation each time. And just when he reached the end of endurance, Potter raised it again, fast strokes as deep as he could make them. Draco could feel how hard each thrust struck the back of his throat. It must have been making him sick, and Draco could have told him that sheer force wouldn't get those muscles to do what he wanted. Another time, he thought as the pressure in his balls wrenched up to unbearable, another time he'd give Potter a thorough lesson in the art of taking it down deep, but for now it was enough that he wanted to, that he was hungry to eat Draco's cock as far down his throat as it would go.

Draco's body was as much off the bed as on it now, unable to hold himself back from bucking up into Potter's mouth and Potter was making little moans around his cock – arousal or distress, he had no idea. Intense concentration marked Potter's brow as he sucked blindly, faster and faster, tendons in his neck straining.

"Say 't again," Potter said suddenly, resuming the next stroke with barely a break in rhythm. Oh fuck, what had he– "Again!"

Was that a slight drop in pace? He couldn't stand it, he was so unbearably close and Potter's mouth had been so beautifully unselfish until now. There wasn't room in his mind anymore for anything except the orgasm that was throbbing through his whole cock now, begging for release. 

_"Harry."_ Potter's moan of approval vibrated through him. It was much easier to say the second time, almost effortless the third, so he kept it up for those last few seconds as Potter picked up the pace again, sucking him over the edge and into a freefall of pure pleasure. 

Draco came in one long, silent spasm, arching up against Potter's weight with his mouth in a wordless, helpless snarl. No slackening in the stimulation on his cock, Potter sucked him right through it as he flung his head back and dug his fingers into the pillow. As the pleasure sapped out of him again, he had to keep his breaths shallow to hold off the whimper that wanted to get out. 

He was wrung-out and empty and utterly wrecked. As Potter eased his weight off his thighs, the blood tingled back into his feet and he flexed the ache out of his legs. They were drenched in sweat, both of them. Potter trailed his fingers through the slick over Draco's breastbone, managing a faint smile as he sucked his lips clean and hesitantly tested his jaw. 

A couple of Potter's limbs cracked as he stretched out by Draco's side. He bent his face down close, questioning. Draco couldn't – he couldn't let Potter kiss him right now, not when he didn't have the slightest defence in place. He dragged one hand out from behind his head and laid his fingertips on Potter's lips. Potter's breath slipped between them, warm and slow. He took two of Draco's fingers gently between his teeth and let his eyes fall closed and seemed content with that. His eyebrows were a wretched mess and his lashes clumped together with moisture, the product of exertion and all that abuse of his gag reflex. He was really just a little bit pathetic in his eagerness. Draco drew his fingers free as Potter's forehead descended to rest in the crook of his neck. He even allowed the possessive drape of Potter's leg over his own. After a marathon session like that, Draco was too spent to refuse him anything much.

Which brought him back to the question of Potter's satisfaction. He drew back the hand that had somehow fallen to stroking Potter's cheek and worked it around to where Potter's hip rested against him. 

"It's okay," croaked a muffled voice into his neck. "I'm good." 

Stirred, Potter rolled over, cheek pillowed on Draco's upper arm, nestling back against his side with the firm curve of his arse snug against Draco's hip. A presumptuous foot hooked behind Draco's. 

"I take it you're staying."

Potter kissed the inside of his elbow. "Yeah. I am."

In the lull of slowing breathing, Draco rolled up behind him, snaking his hand around Potter's waist to refresh his memory of the contours of his chest, earning himself a lovely, contented sigh. Potter was warm and solid and pliant in his arms. He ran his fingers down Potter's stomach and cupped them over the tangle of his pubic hair and the soft length of his cock. It was a wholly possessive gesture. In the morning, he was going to give Potter the fucking of his life and see if he bore himself with any greater dignity than Draco had tonight. He felt Potter's smile pull the tendons in his throat. 

He murmured, "You can't live here, you understand?"

"Good. I don't want that." Sleepy-voiced, Potter closed his hand over Draco's, threading their fingers together on top of his cock. "Not yet."

For a while afterwards, as Potter faded into deep sleep and all of his muscles relaxed against Draco's chest, Draco stared at the mess of black hair in front of him. Only when Potter was unconscious did he shift closer so he could press his face into the back of Potter's neck where the sweat-damp hair smelled so wonderfully, personally, of Potter. He breathed it in, his mouth layering the warm skin in slow, indulgent kisses.

He was fucked. He was going soft. He was courting disaster. But a Malfoy never did things by halves and heaven help the next unfortunate soul who laid a hand on his man. 

Potter slept in perfect stillness in Draco's arms. He made no sign of awareness as Draco's grip on him grew fiercer, drawing their bodies hard against each other as he buried his face in Potter's clean, wholesome, untameable hair and, finally, joined him in sleep.

**


	4. Dragon Riding for Beginners – How the cover boy finally got it

Draco thought the same thing every time: I'm my own man and I don't have to walk through this door. Merlin knew he'd considered often enough the idea of simply vanishing. Lhasa, Manila, Buenos Aires – his past projects had given him contacts in exotic locations all the world over, some of them so remote that even Potter might not be able to track him down. 

This was a temporary arrangement, even if a mere two nights in a hotel bed in Brasov had been a long enough absence to make his pulse quicken just now as he approached Potter's front door. He could have come round the back way, through Toad's Eye Lane, like everybody else. But he liked this door with its short journey through Muggle streets in his slightly inappropriate clothes. He liked having a doorway that was all his own. He liked the little foyer inside the door, with the quiet company of Potter's coats on their pegs as Potter's arms slid around his neck and he got his first taste of a long night of Potter's mouth. He was even quite fond of the strips of blue and red stained glass that flanked the doorway, which, for a few select minutes in the early evening, might dapple Potter's left hip in colour as Draco backed him into the wall and undressed him. 

He took a minute on the step to gather himself. His fingers in his pocket turned the key over and over. If he used the bell, everything could stay as it had been. It had been no accident that Harry had given him the key the day before his departure for Romania. It had weighed in his pocket in the old club in Bucharest, with Weasley yelling in his ear as they watched the half-naked bodies flexing and thrusting. 

The key turned and admitted him in an instant. There. Not as bad as all that. 

Potter was in the kitchen with his hands buried in a glass bowl whose contents crumbled between his fingers. Hard to believe that Draco had, until recently, considered cooking to be a task for women or house-elves. It looked like a man's work the way Potter did it. Both his biceps strained under the tight sleeves of his t-shirt, which must be an old one he'd acquired when he'd joined the team at nineteen, before anyone had imagined how the addition of a fine layer of muscle over his chest and upper arms would banish his wiry teenage frame forever.

He looked up with a grin at Draco's step, hands keeping their rhythm. "How were the dragons?"

"Frisky," Draco said by way of extreme under-statement. "I found a Longhorn who'll do nicely for the journey. A runt who'll be glad to get away from the others. One of his horns broken. From a fight. Or something."

The thin t-shirt undulating over Potter's shoulders was testing his powers of speech. It suddenly seemed a miracle that he'd managed to keep his mind on work for two whole days. He came around behind Potter and moulded his chest against Potter's back. His fingertips found the opening of Potter's jeans pockets and threatened to go further. 

The sound of the bowl rocking ceased. Under his left hand he could feel Potter's instant response. In his mind's thickening lust, it seemed obvious that he was going to have to get a bigger dragon and take Potter with him on his ride to Vladivostok. More than a couple of days' absence from this was unthinkable. 

As Potter ground backwards, breath more like a sigh, he flattened one palm over those gorgeous stomach muscles. 

"That's not fair," Potter said in the voice that Draco had got to know pretty well, that said he was aroused and pleased and willing to try just about anything Draco cared to suggest. He held up his hands with the mixture from the bowl clumped on his fingertips. 

Of all the things he could have done with an immobilised Harry Potter, Draco took the least adventurous option. He brushed aside the ends of Potter hair and kissed the side of his neck, from the hairline down to the hollow inside his shoulder muscle, sucking at his leisure and pressed up close enough to rub against Potter's arse and let him feel what it was doing to him. That got him an eager armful of gently writhing Potter, who tipped his head encouragingly sideways. He turned the kiss into a soft, scraping bite and for the first time felt resistance. 

"If I'd known you had this in mind," Potter said, still sounding sultry, "I'd have put the roast on earlier."

With the clean back of his hand, he steadied Draco's head so he could twist around and kiss his mouth, lingering and chaste. "Unless you want to be eating at midnight, you'll have to let me get this done first."

He stroked the nicely defined line beneath Potter's denim, soaking up the lovely heat of it, making it fill out further. "Why don't we skip dinner?"

Potter grabbed his wrist and removed his hand, irritated. "It's not like I don't want to. But I bought the beef specially." 

He pushed the bowl aside. Empty handed, Draco returned to the far side of the kitchen counter and slouched against the wall to watch as Potter went to the little Muggle cold box with the light that came on when the door opened and pulled out a heavy, paper-wrapped package. 

"Well don't let's interrupt your work of art." He didn't hold back his sneer. Potter had wanted it as badly as he did – he was certain of it.

On the top shelf, just visible as the box was closing again, he saw two tall glasses filled with thick chocolate. In the door stood a champagne bottle. 

It was all a bit late for seduction, wasn't it? They were well past that. In a few short months, the two of them had gone from occasional weekend sessions with a mouth-watering build-up, to an unstated arrangement that, most nights, saw one of them on the other's doorstep – and now he possessed a key. He could list Potter's most reliable turn-ons in his sleep. He liked to be kissed and stroked at the same time. A tongue working its way into him still drove him crazy and his surest plea for it was coming to bed fresh from the shower, steamy and clean. In the mornings, he woke up ravenous and liked Draco underneath him. He couldn't, being who he was, stand sex in public places, but he loved the stray touches in restaurants or in the post-match locker room that made him insatiable by the time they got home. If he was too intensely focused on fucking to be a talker, he still got off on Draco's mouth against his ear, filthy words like a caress. 

It was a bit late for seduction when even Weasley's world-famous torso had started to look second best. It was a bit late for seduction when Draco's Sundays had gone from debauchery day with whatever willing hussy he'd picked up the night before, to match day, sharing Potter's early start and sneaking into the public stands with dark glasses and a hood. 

Eyes sticking deliberately to his work, Potter threw the slab of beef with a slap onto the bare counter.

Fringed with white fat, it looked like it was fresh off the animal. Draco wasn't sure he'd ever seen raw meat before, though once or twice in the Manor's kitchens he must have been in its presence. Potter sprinkled it with pepper and salt and rubbed the seasoning into the grain. Meat was no more than muscle, he thought, watching it bend under Potter's strength. Muscle, just like his calf, his thighs, his belly. He should have been revolted that this was a thing he would later be expected to eat, but all he had in his stomach was a wild sort of fascination with the ideas of life and death and appetite, and the sure touch of Potter's hands.

Smoothing the meat out flat, Potter dipped into his bowl and laid a strip of stuffing along one edge. His knuckles gripped powerfully as he fastened the slab of meat around its core of grains and herbs and nuts and what else Draco didn't know. The contents became inconsequential as Potter gripped the near side and rolled it over the stuffing, folding it over the far edge, clamping it tightly in the wide span between thumb and last finger. His broad grip around that helpless hunk of meat made Draco's arse-cheeks clench inside his trousers. He wanted a glass of water for his dry mouth, but couldn't take his eyes off Potter's hands long enough to fix it.

And then there were the knots to be tied. Almost without looking, Potter tugged out the third drawer and plucked a ball of twine from it. He wound out a length of it – the distance from fingertip to elbow, no more – then snapped it in his teeth. Three times. He lifted the near edge of the meat and wiggled the length of twine beneath it, sliding it to the middle. Then he regathered the unwrapped package and held it with the outer edge of each hand while his fingers twisted a knot and pull it tight. The flesh cinched. He pulled it tighter, straightening one edge with a fingertip, pressing the knot down to hold it. Two quick loops, a tug and it was done. Draco watched, indulging in the memory of where those hands had touched him. 

Potter went even quicker on the two ends, shifting the meat ninety degrees, working the twine under, pulling it taut. His fingers darted quick as charmed needles, thin red rims under his nails, and not one of them slipped, not once. It took a while for Draco to make the memory connection. He moved like Snape. Perfect co-ordination between hand and mind, each confident that the other would not falter. 

In a few economical movements, Potter had the meat on a spiked tray on top of the oven and Draco, already more than half hard in his pants, breathed a sigh of relief. 

But out of the cupboard came a bag of vegetables and Potter set to work just as authoritatively on those. Carrots that made Draco's mouth water as the peeler sliced down their flanks, stripping skin away, never missing a beat. The knife balanced in perfect obedience, hilt firm in one hand with the other steadying the top of it as he forced it down in three effortless strokes and severed the orange flesh cleanly. 

"Did you fly one of them?" Potter asked.

It took a few moments for Draco to pull his mind back from the fate of the small potato in Potter's grasp, dipped in a bowl of water and scrubbed, two of them nestling in a perfect fit in his palm.

"Yes," he said, just a bit dizzily. "Two actually. Both Longhorns. An old warhorse who barely got above the trees, and a pup. One of the trainers came up with me." Draco shuddered at the whisper of shorn potato and the slam of the knife. "She was very professional."

Potter smiled. "What was it like?"

Draco wet his lips. "Hard work. They're wilful animals. But exciting all the same."

"How's Charlie?"

"Busy. He's on his way to Mongolia now."

Another smile as a courgette met a swift end. As Draco watched the unconscious knife-work, he wondered how anyone could ever have imagined that Voldemort had stood a chance. Big field mushrooms came out of the bag, and Potter laid aside his killing weapon to cradle each cup gently as he wrenched its stem free. Each stem came away clean and neat, discarded as Potter laid the cup with careful fingertips on the tray.

Potter straightened the last of the root vegetables and slid the first tray into the oven. He scrubbed his hands in the water bowl, thorough right down to the edges of his fingernails, and even that looked to Draco like an erotic act. 

Wiping his hands on a towel, he finally turned his full attention to Draco. "Takes about an-"

From Potter's face, Draco had a fairly good idea of what must be written across his own. Potter dropped the towel onto the counter, and that was the last gentle movement he made. In four strides he had Draco shoved up against the wall, moaning and clinging, pride in shreds. 

"Fuck, Harry-" was all he could make his mouth produce. "Harry, Harry-"

With his cheeks trapped between Potter's palms and his head against the wall, he gave his mouth up to Potter's assault. Fierce, darting kisses, possessive tongue thrusts, bites from his lips to his earlobe, bruising his jaw and making him so crazy his fingernails scraped Potter's back through his shirt. With his glasses hanging askew, Potter looked feral. Draco wanted to give everything up. Wanted to beg. Wanted to be made to beg. 

"I want-" he had begun when Potter's hands clawed their way under his clothes and reduced him to another moan. Potter was pawing his chest, thumbnails roughing up his nipples until he had them swollen and tender for him, then he forced one hand down the back of Draco's trousers. 

"Fuck me," Draco panted, and this time it was Potter who moaned.

"Want to," he growled into Draco's ear, biting his jaw, digging all four fingers hard into his arse cheek and bringing him right to the edge of orgasm. "God I want to."

One by one, Draco unhooked his fingers from Potter's back and pushed him away. "Where?" He stripped off his shirt and dropped it. 

Blinking with his glasses in his hand, Potter stared at the livid marks he'd scratched and sucked into Draco's skin. "Bathroom," he managed to whisper, and then both of them were stumbling down the hallway, tearing off their clothes as they went. 

Since the lube was in the bedroom, a staircase too far for their endurance, Potter ransacked the cabinet, shaking hands throwing tubes and bottles onto the ground until he found something that would do. Draco didn't care what it was. He kicked away his trousers and bent over the sink, closing his eyes. 

A hard grip on his shoulder yanked him up again. He had a momentary vision of Potter lunging for him, mouth open like a feeding dragon, and then they were kissing, harder than ever – a snarling, grasping, lacerating sort of kiss. And while Potter's tongue slammed into him, one cool finger was slicking down his channel and seeking its way in. 

"Don't." His mouth was full of Potter's breath; he wanted nothing else in his lungs. "I won't last. I won't- Harry!" 

One finger was inside him. His eyes fluttered back and his knees trembled. He had to have more. Every muscle in his body cried out for Potter's cock in him. He twisted away and got himself back where he'd started, bent over the sink, forehead sunk on his folded arms. Potter's fingers pushed into him again, two of them prising his channel open. Transfixed by the sight of Potter bending over his task with the fierce determination that belonged on the pitch, the only thing he wanted to feel was that sweet pressure with its shadow of pain, unwilling muscles giving way before Potter's strength, just another hunk of meat to be had. In and out, stretching, burning, forcing, fucking him hard and fast until he was on the edge again. 

"Stop!" he groaned.

Potter's free hand snatched his hair and wrenched his head up. 

"What was that?"

Oh sweet fucking Merlin – his eyes were blazing and he looked like he was going to do this over Draco's resistance if he had to. And meanwhile, with one hand gripping Draco's hair, the other continued to work him open. The edge of the sink was slippery and the smell of their rutting was everywhere. He had to have Potter inside him. 

"Fuck me." He held Potter's lunatic gaze in the mirror and let his voice go thick with desperation. "Take your gorgeous fat prick and fuck me until I split."

For an instant, Potter reeled as if he'd been hit. Then the scorching tip of his cock was against Draco's entrance, his slippery hands were on Draco's hips, and he was forcing his way inside. Draco's hands spasmed into fists on the counter. His too-eager passage fought Potter every inch of the way, pain radiating through his abdomen, glorious sensation. In the mirror, his chest heaved and trembled with his panting breath. He'd needed this for too long to remember, pondered for weeks how to get Potter to take him like this. His face was shining and pink behind his unkempt white hair. 

Potter pulled back and slammed into him. His legs shuddered right down to the ground. There was a moment of respite as the balls-deep sensation seemed to catch Potter off guard too – his reflected face blanked entirely – but then he threw himself into the task. 

"Yes. Fuck. Yes!" The words jiggled out of him with the force of Potter's thrusts. His hands skidded on the sink, knocked over a cup and clenched a protective grip around the counter edge, trying to steady himself against the onslaught. Oh fucking hell – the bathroom echoed with the sound of his knees hitting the doors of the bathroom cupboard, each thump coming faster – the sound of a stampede of lust, faster even than his rattling heartbeat. He put his forehead on the cool counter and braced his free hand against the mirror and let Potter pound him. He ached, fuck he ached, but it wasn't enough, wasn't enough-

Hands just beneath his ribs, clutching hard enough to hurt, holding him still for effortless penetration. Potter was an animal like this – and Draco only wanted to be prey. That hot grip moved down to his hips, held him like a piece of meat. There was no resistance left in him. The tip of his erection slapped against the counter but he didn't have a shred of willpower left to do anything about it as Potter battered his passage into silky, slack compliance. 

"Harder – fuck –" He braced hard against the glass and laid his free hand over Potter's unforgiving grip. The strength in those knuckles bruised him right down to the bone and he wanted the same bruises deep inside him, deeper, it was never deep enough. Potter was obliging him in every way, slamming him against the counter, no pauses to spare the burning flesh he was abusing. He was – sweet mercy, this was Harry Potter without the veil of butter-wouldn't-melt that was all the rest of the world ever saw. This was the demon inside him, the stripped-bare dark core of anger and need, and it wanted Draco, it was glued to Draco's hips, shoving inside him. 

The only greater satisfaction Draco craved was-

Oh fuck. Potter pulsed inside him, a cry in his throat like it was more than he'd prepared for. Heat and rippling cock-flesh and slickness getting shoved right up into him. Potter shuddered as he came and seemed to curl into himself, wilting over Draco's back. As if all his blood was draining out of him as well. Collapsing, his chest stroked Draco's back then withdrew with each gasp of breath. His arms slid around Draco's chest.

Draco wanted to kill him. He wanted to cry. He needed to come.

"I love you," Potter slurred into his spine. 

Draco roared. The accompanying clench of fury drove Potter out of him. But their reflexes were evenly matched and Potter just gripped harder around his chest and shoved him right back down. Draco's chin struck the counter.

"Need something, Draco?" he asked – hard-edged now, the previous warmth gone. "Need this?" 

Potter's hand wrapped around his cock – extremely firm, rough palmed, fingers shifting to get a perfect fit. The murmur of voice vibrated from Potter's jawbone down into his spine. "Do you?"

"Yes." He had to screw his eyes shut to be able to say it. He preferred to have the advantage in these little games. "Harry."

That word was infallible magic, he knew it. His cock swelled saying it. Potter sighed. His free hand sought out a nipple to molest while the other closed tight. No more teasing, no hesitation. He jerked Draco's cock hard out from his body, launching into the fast rhythm that was the quickest route to orgasm. His feet edged Draco's legs further apart; the soft head of his cock nudged Draco's arse, sliding in the slick mess between his cheeks, making him think how soon it could be impaling him again.

His hands splayed out like skeleton fingers on the counter as Potter stroked him, kissing his back and planting his chin right above the shoulder-blade. Draco's head swung up to look in the mirror. Over his shoulder, Potter's eyes met his. Saw the flushed condition of his face, his bite-swollen lips, his wet eyelashes, and, reflected between Draco's hands, they both watched the dark head of his cock swallowed up in Potter's fist. Potter's lips parted slowly. Draco came. 

Potter kept watching that too, even as Draco's sight blurred. Watched as Draco shuddered what felt like his soul out through the tip of his cock. Watched as he shivered his way into stillness. Kissed his bucking back as the hand that milked him grew come-slippery and gentle. 

Only by keeping is eyes firmly shut could Draco avoid voicing any of the trite exclamations that occurred to him. When he finally opened them, it was to see a sex-savaged wreck, painted in bite marks, grey eyes entreatingly huge. In a manoeuvre somewhere between folding and falling, Potter went down onto the floor. Draco's fierce grip on the counter barely averted the same fate. 

With his back against the cupboard, Potter was laughing – a soft sound that shook right through him.

Forcing his spine to straighten, Draco finger-combed his damp hair off his face, trying for some sort of poise. He had to swallow before he could speak. "Funny, is it?"

Potter stroked the back of his hand down Draco's hip, around to his arse. The fit of laughter passed but, for once, he didn't seem to have anything to say. 

"We-" Potter said, and gave up.

Draco straightened the cup and left the semen slick exactly where it was – a bare inch from the head of Potter's toothbrush. 

When Potter stood, he wore a familiar, fond look. Draco slipped through his grasp before the single most exciting fuck of his life could be diluted with a bout of wet kissing.

Potter caught up with him in the hall and confiscated the shirt from Draco's hands. 

"Oh no," he said. "The roast will be another hour at least." 

This time, since it was abundantly clear what was coming, Draco let himself be kissed. He wound his arms around Potter's neck and rubbed up against him. Potter broke off from mouthing the hinge of his jaw.

"The first-" And Draco knew from the whispering tone what the subject was going to be. "The first time you did that to me – god, Draco, I felt it for a week. I want you to feel me too. Every time you move. I want – I want to fuck you so hard you can't even think about a broomstick without flinching." 

Draco had a blissful image of a bank holiday weekend spent entirely between the four corners of Potter's bed, as he slaked his lust on Draco's willing arse, again and again and again and again. Until his whole body quaked for mercy. Until he exhausted Potter's capacity for dominance and left him tame. 

He put on his darkest glower. 

"I dare you," he said. "I dare you to do it."

Potter's eyes gripped his. Both of them breathed through their mouths, aroused again, almost ready to do something about it. The air got so thin when Potter looked at him like that. 

"Upstairs then," Draco said – and he'd meant to purr it but somehow it was more like a groan.

They stumbled upstairs. 

Potter delivered. 

And delivered.

And Draco lapped it up. 

By the time the slightly smoky roast called them back to their senses, any more sex was out of the question and, for Draco, even sitting and standing were going to be issues for a good while. He had never been buggered with such thorough determination, and part of him wasn't sure he ever wanted to be again. 

After dinner, fed and satisfied and dressed again, he rearranged himself among Potter's pillows to ease the pressure on all his many aches. His empty champagne glass quivered slightly as he hovered it to the top of the dresser. Potter sank onto the end of the bed, crossing his legs awkwardly as he balanced his dessert in one hand.

He sat quietly, and it occurred to Draco how bizarre it was to think of this bed being used for something other than sex or sleep. 

"You didn't think much of the roast then," Potter said, glum to a degree that the cruellest of Draco's taunts had never been able to reduce him to. "Not what you're used to, I guess."

Draco was brimful of contentment and too exhausted for anything but blunt truth. 

"Do you imagine," he replied crisply, "that I care to put much of anything into one half on my digestive system after the mauling you've just given to the other?"

When he finally waded out of the swamp of his blush, Potter just said, "Oh."

He was smiling though. Easy to please. Draco thought maybe there was something to be said for this whole raised-under-a-staircase idea. It lowered his expectations to a level that Draco could effortlessly exceed.

"I could manage a little of that, though."

Looking inappropriately pleased with himself, Potter gripped his glass of chocolate mousse and crawled over, knees on either side of Draco's hips. Where their bodies met, there was a novel lack of arousal, soft cocks brushing through their trousers. 

"A little of this?" Potter murmured.

Draco opened his mouth for the laden spoon and licked it with casual obscenity. 

"Good," he pronounced. The second spoonful was daintier and Potter turned the spoon over to watch Draco lick out the curve of it. "Very good."

When Potter cleaned the sticky corner of Draco's lips with his fingertip, Draco, unaccountably, blushed. Sitting back, Potter directed a few mouthfuls to himself. 

"I thought I'd come to Romania with you, when you go back," he said off-handedly when he had Draco conveniently gagged with another mouthful of mousse. "There's two new Seekers they want to try out. This'll give them a chance."

Draco swallowed. He should play this cool, as if that it wasn't exactly what he wanted. 

"Okay."

There was a lot to be said for playing it cool, but it seldom resulted in the blinding smile Potter graced him with, momentarily. He propped the glass against Draco's shoulder, with its stem on the pillow, so he could lean right down, and he made the unequivocal gesture of tossing his glasses onto the free pillow. 

"You obviously have some sort of twisted obsession with dragons," Draco bit out as his face descended.

Potter's lips opened slowly over Draco's, his kiss was patient. It was going to be an interesting night. This was the sort of embrace that would normally have led to fucking, if either of them had been up to it. This, apparently, was what desire felt like with the edge of need taken off it. Easy, comfortable, close. Potter's body was solid and warm on top of him.

"Yeah, I do," Potter said, chocolate-mouthed, and kissed him.

And kissed him again.

And didn't stop.


End file.
